A MESSAGE FROM BOARD CHAIR, PHILIP GIRARD
As a member of the board of directors since last August, and board chair since February, I am looking forward to attending my first year-end recitals at CCAC in the week of June 15th. The last recital, on Saturday, June 20th, will also feature our annual general meeting (AGM). Parents who have been with CCAC for more than a year will know that at the AGM candidates for the board of directors make short speeches and parents vote for a slate of directors to serve for the following year. For those parents joining us this year for the first time, it will be a new experience.
The Ontario Not-for-Profit Corporations Act requires that we have an annual general meeting for the election of directors. It also requires that bylaws of all such corporations be updated periodically, and ours are overdue for updating. We have prepared a set of revised bylaws and, in addition to asking parents to vote for board members, we will also be asking you to approve this new set of bylaws. The document link is provided here but as the language is rather legalistic, I will provide a brief summary in plain language.
You are probably aware that in for-profit corporations, the members are called shareholders, and they are the ones who get to vote for the board of directors. With not-for-profit corporations, there are no shareholders, so members have to be identified in a different way. CCAC decided when it was created 46 years ago to treat the parents as members, that is why you are asked to vote on the board of directors.
In more recent times, non-profits like CCAC whose activities are aimed at children have gone a different route. Rather than have the parents as members, they have decided to make the directors members. This is allowed by law and is now very common, and that is the approach we have taken in these revised bylaws. If you approve the bylaws, parents will no longer vote in the board of directors at the AGM after this year. But in order to ensure that parents still have a voice in CCAC’s affairs, we are proposing to always have some parents join the board. The slate of directors we are asking you to approve on the 20th will include some parents (the exact number has not been finalized).
We think this will be a better way to run CCAC. Instead of parents voting once a year at a rather hurried meeting after a recital, we will have parents on the board who can participate more directly in the running of CCAC year-round. They will provide more effective parental input than once-a-year voting at the AGM. I encourage you to think about serving on the board. Please contact me at girardpv@gmail.com or Sevda Sinan if you would like to do so, or if you have any questions.
I look forward to meeting you and to witnessing the progress the students have made over the last year.
Philip Girard, Board Chair, on behalf of the board of directors