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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2022 8:54 am 
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Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2018 9:35 pm
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1.) The board only meets once per month, this means that members on the board often must work on things independently between meetings. This often means serving on committees and doing other tasks to ensure the kingdom can move forward. Can you provide examples on how you will manage teams of people, and work tasks to completion without having external oversight of your work?

2.) The BOD have the primary function of caring for the business aspects of the kingdom. What skills do you possess that make you a good fit for the position?

3.) We have begun a strong recovery from Covid. Part of the fiduciary duty of the board is to protect that growth. What strategies can you employ to ensure the assets of Amtgard, Kingdom of the Emerald Hills, Inc are protected?


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 Post Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2022 1:15 am 
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Joined: Mon Mar 25, 2013 7:07 pm
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Please be aware, my answers are long, but so is my experience.
Question 1:The board only meets once per month, this means that members on the board often must work on things independently between meetings. This often means serving on committees and doing other tasks to ensure the kingdom can move forward. Can you provide examples of how you will manage teams of people, and work tasks to completion without having external oversight of your work?
Answer1:
The question is about being able to work without oversight towards a goal. In actuality, this could be within a deadline or over an extended period. Part of the equation is also about just moving things forward. I do have some rather extensive experience with both of these: working independently, and working as a team. My experience extends further into working as a team member or leading a team. The hardest part is always leading a team, but that is where you identify individual team members who fit the criteria for assisting in helping move that work.
In teaching, I have led or been part of teams of professional development of teaching teams in coordinating lessons, identifying issues according to data, and addressing that data through interventions and always with my team members.
  • Fifteen years experience with Professional Development teams through English, English Second Language, Writing, and Data gathering and data mining.
  • Ten years experience in leading student-centered teams to get out a five-month project in which students were forefront in the publication of a yearbook. For nine of those years my team members were all volunteers since I did not have a dedicated class for this task.
  • Ten years publishing a Middle School yearbook by quickly identifying student leaders who, with coaching, could encourage, assign, oversee, and follow-up on assignments for other students. While overseeing, coaching, encouraging, and handling the monetary end which the students could not do by law.
  • Twenty-four years of teaching simple every-day responsibility and how it can be hard, but rewarding.
  • One year of an actual yearbook class and able to still teach these things, but now with grades.
In Amtgard, the following is my experience with team members:
  • Ten years on the Burning Lands BOD (Pre AIBOD and Pre-COM)
  • Two of those years as secretary/treasurer of the Burning Lands BOD
  • Webmaster for the first http://www.amtgardinc.com webpage from BLBOD assignment for task. From assignment to inception, to completion was about three weeks. This was from a time when http://www.amtgard.com was not available to the BLBOD due to conflicts.
  • As part of the Burning Lands BOD prior to any AIBOD, or Circle of Monarchs, as a team member of the BOD we were responsible for ensuring a successful IK event through choosing of Autocrats, then dealing with issues such as contracts and insurance for sites, as well as auditing petitioning lands for Kingdom status, and overseeing the smaller team of corpora checks prior to any acceptance as a kingdom.
  • Two years to take an 85 plus page jumble of a document and turned it into a usable document for the Wardancers. Along with Noah Hunteil Holweck (V8 team member), we turned a tangle into a set of guidelines for a company that encompasses history, themes, guidelines, appendixes, and garbing ideas while reducing the actual guidelines by 2/5ths.
Lessons from working as a team member and leading teams:
  • Reassure those whose ideas do not fit the circumstances that the idea only is not right this time, but the one who offered it needs encouragement to keep offering suggestions. The idea does not equal the person.
  • Encouragement goes a long way, as do complements and celebrations of victories.
  • Adhere to deadlines. Know as far as possible in advance if there will be a deadline issue and be upfront about it.
  • Even if everyone else is jumping ship, take your own responsibilities seriously. The governing body needs the work or it would not have been assigned. If you say you will do it, do it.
Currently:
  • • I am working with Shroudstar and seriously going through Board documents in order to comb them out and make them not just more smoothly functioning, but looking at them in terms of On-boarding, defining roles, and passing on the little things that are important to understand if one has never been a board member. I seriously would like to see the work completed. I see this fully being completed in the next few weeks.
[br][br]
Question 2: The BOD has the primary function of caring for the business aspects of the kingdom. What skills do you possess that make you a good fit for the position?
Answer 2:I have the business experience to help with the running of this kingdom.
  • Implementation of waivers and minor waivers for attending IK events after a minor with no parent on site, and no actual guardian, suffered from hypothermia during GotC 16. She had to be medically evacuated from site, and it took over five hours to locate her parents. We had waivers by GotC 17. The minor waiver Amtgard currently uses was written by me after GotC 16, and based on the Texas Boy Scout’s waiver for minors.
  • Two years as the Secretary/Treasurer of the BLBOD with an operating budget of roughly $12,000 primarily geared to a successful implementation of the Gathering of the Crowns each year.
  • Ten years on the BLOBD as contributing board member involved with checking corporas of petitioning lands for Kingdom status, auditing attendance records prior to the ORK for the same reasons.
  • Twenty-four years as a teacher to 14 year-olds has taught me some modicum of patience.
  • Twenty-four years of experience understanding the mix of law and education under many different circumstances have allowed me to bring a lot of that to Amtgard.
  • Sixteen years of experience with handling records and monies:
    • Eight years BLBOD member
    • Two years BLBOD Secretary/Treasurer – responsible for the publication of Board minutes and fiscal responsibilities.
    • Ten years School Yearbook advisor solely responsible for money handling and reporting.
    • Five years as King’s Point Prime Minister and record keeper for monies and inventory.
    • Six months as KPM, ensuring records were recorded in a timely manner with as little disturbance as possible. Also ensuring a smooth transition to the new KPM.
    • Two reigns as Regent in the Burning Lands, two terms as PM in the Burning Lands.
  • Running a Kingdom on its own and under the AIBOD and the COM is just another form of teamwork and responsibility. As long as the focus remains on the kingdom members, the work remains good.

Question 3:We have begun a strong recovery from Covid. Part of the fiduciary duty of the board is to protect that growth. What strategies can you employ to ensure the assets of Amtgard, Kingdom of the Emerald Hills, Inc are protected?
Answer 3:
As the kingdom coffers again begin to strengthen, it is up to the BOD to ensure that our populous get the best bargains available for our events. I was lucky enough to help vote and promote the use of the Wister site for both Midreign and Endreign. The price was so compelling against the obvious amenities that there was little to no risk for the kingdom. It was important to be sure we had it for both events. In the end, there was little question that Wister was by far the best solution at this moment in time. The team that found it should be highly commended. However, the assets of the Kingdom will always be a bottom line to keep squarely in the fore. The BOD deals with mundane issues. One of these is ensuring that just because Corpora says the Monarch can spend up to 10%, does not mean it is a great idea. [br][br]
We also have a yearly responsibility to the AIBOD for which every kingdom is responsible. While that responsibility may have been given a pass during the plague, that is not to say it will not soon come again. It is the Board’s responsibility to ensure all our monetary needs are met, and this can only be done through very careful husbanding and tight-fisted handling of funds. Throwing money at a problem to fix the problem is not the best way to handle our Kingdom. I understand this and will do all in my power to find solutions along with my fellow Board members. I’m not afraid of hard or tedious work.[br][br]
At KP, I once had a request from our then-Monarch to invest in what amounted to a side-hustle to make money, but it would have meant the spending of nearly half of our funds. As PM, he was hoping for my support. He didn’t get it. Instead, he got a bit of a lecture on fiscal responsibility to future monarchs and the future spending of the park. I had the figures of income averages/year, how much we spent per year on the rental of our pavilion, etc. When compared to the proposed reduction on a possibility – not a certainty – of return, he quickly saw my point. It is that responsibility to future members that every BOD member needs to keep in the forefront. Yes, we have quarterly responsibilities, but those are for us to come together, and often break even in the very least. It is to the Kingdom’s monetary future as a whole to which the Board must always pay fealty, for in that manner, we pay fealty to the members of the Kingdom.

_________________
Countess Dame Mezzie
Kingdom Prime Minister


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 Post Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:11 pm 
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Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2018 3:57 pm
Posts: 6
Hi! Here goes...

1.) The board only meets once per month, this means that members on the board often must work on things independently between meetings. This often means serving on committees and doing other tasks to ensure the kingdom can move forward. Can you provide examples on how you will manage teams of people, and work tasks to completion without having external oversight of your work?

I might start with ensuring that the team feels properly empowered and feels a sense of ownership in the task. In my experience, this helps with feeling the appropriate weight of accountability. Communication is among the most important facets of leading a team, so fostering an open channel of communication between all points will be important. From there, I would help guide the team toward an understanding of the broader organization and the situation surrounding the tasks we are undertaking, including the individual concerns and decision-making criteria of groups within the whole, whether official or unofficial. Trust within the team and clear, actionable goals are also important. We all work better when we know what we're working toward, and know those working with us have our best interests at heart.

2.) The BOD have the primary function of caring for the business aspects of the kingdom. What skills do you possess that make you a good fit for the position?

As I think I stated the last time I answered this question, I think a willingness to learn how to grow into the position might be among my best qualities that I bring to the table. I think an ability to set and work toward actionable, tangible goals, as well as elements of organization, delegation, and flexible decision-making that I have picked up in my life's varied travels may be helpful to the work of the position. And those tools I don't already have, I am certain I can pick up effectively.

3.) We have begun a strong recovery from Covid. Part of the fiduciary duty of the board is to protect that growth. What strategies can you employ to ensure the assets of Amtgard, Kingdom of the Emerald Hills, Inc are protected?

The need to recover from something so devastating as the Covid-19 pandemic is something I would guess is without precedent for our game in its short existence. Therefore, the growth that we have achieved is therefore historic in itself, and so must be preserved and allowed to flourish to even greater heights. I don't claim to be a financial expert in any way, shape, or form -- just a guy with a solid enough grasp on common sense. If a wanted to guarantee my own financial soundness, especially while rebuilding after a period of being... less-than-sound, let's say, I'd stick with simple good practice for a while: careful spending while looking for the best return on the investments I make. While it would likely be more complex than that, dealing with a much larger entity (that at least doesn't exactly have to take snacking from vending machines in the break room into account), I am pleased to say that I wouldn't have to be making those decisions alone, and as those with greater expertise move to the fore in that arena, I can listen with an ear toward the sense such thoughts might make, and perhaps even help with the details that I do have experience with.

_________________
Seven of Ravencroft


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