Joint Committee Terms of Reference

Membership and Appointment

• The committee will be chaired by a non-staff member of the Board who reports to the Board regarding Committee business, decisions and activities.
• The committee will be comprised ideally of 9-15 members, not including project/event volunteers who may attend meetings from time to time, board and staff members.
• Members may be appointed to a committee by the chair or the board of directors.
• All committee members should express a commitment to DMG's mandate and values. We highly recommend any new community members without a personal anti-oppression/anti-racism framework complete both introductory and advanced anti-racism and anti-oppression training, conflict resolution training. Please contact the board for a list of current service providers. Any fees required for this training will be covered by DMG.

Committee Chair

The chair of the committee can be any one member of the board of directors, or a member volunteer appointed by the board. If the chair is a board member, these responsibilities are also set out in the role description for that director’s position.

The chair is responsible for:

• Scheduling the meetings
• Setting the meeting agendas
• Leading the meetings
• Recording and posting minutes
• Following up on action items
• Bringing proposals to the board for approval

Committee Procedures

• Committee meetings are open to any staff or board members who wish to attend without vote.
• Minutes must be taken at all committee meetings. A copy of all committee minutes should be made available to all board and staff members within 30 days of the meeting, and to the committee’s Basecamp project in a timely manner.
• New projects and recommendations should be brought to the Board for approval at the next meeting of the directors.
• The committee should meet monthly.
• 50% of members constitutes a quorum; the chair or co-chair must be in attendance.
• Major new projects should be brought to the board for approval at a meeting of the directors, or if timeliness is an issue, sooner via Basecamp.

Lines of Communication

To ensure transparency for current and future committee members, committee business must be communicated and documented (in the case of offline conversations and decisions) through a dedicated Basecamp project for the committee.

• Additional Basecamp projects for committee projects may be created at the chair’s discretion. For example, the committee might start a new Basecamp project for a workshop series or long program, or if curriculum or other content will be developed over time. Non-committee members and outside coordinators can be looped in to a subset of content.
• We suggest the committee’s dedicated Slack channel be used instead of email or Basecamp for roughing out ideas and general chatter about projects and scheduling.