2013 Q1 Executive Briefs (Your national executive council uncovered)

So, you’ve seen the pictures of the national executive council (NEC) hard at work by now, and you have an idea of what we look like as we discuss association issues. Not very exciting pictures, I know. But beneath that unexciting exterior there’s lots of neat stuff going on. These quarterly summaries will give you a brief, informal resumé of what we did during the most recent meeting. If you want more info, you can read the official minutes when they are posted.

If this is March, we must be in Vancouver!

And so we were, for the first F2F NEC meeting of the year on March 16 & 17.

Saturday was pretty much devoted to a facilitated Strategic Planning session. We added some non-NEC members and a couple of young EAC members to the mix to make sure we got a range of opinions.

We went over the 2012-2017 Strategic Plan—especially the Operational Plan that would make it all happen—and evaluated the progress of each objective. How far had we gone in accomplishing this objective since we developed the Plan? Was it still a priority? Did we have the resources (i.e., budget and volunteers) at present to complete the objective? Did we still want to commit resources to this objective?

If this is Vancouver, it must be St. Patrick’s Day!

Photo credit: Jacquie Dinsmore

If you’ve always wanted to see what a bunch of editors look like when they’re thinking, check out the photos on EAC’s Flickr site (please note that all smoke coming out of our ears has been photoshopped out). We look pretty solemn, but we’re thinking.

The luck of the Irish was with us on Sunday: we had green decorations all over our conference table and we quickly realized that the Vancouver St. Patrick’s Day parade was marshalling right under our conference room windows, nine storeys down. A balcony off the meeting room, hot sun and a parade made break time quite agreeable.

The day started with a truly comprehensive report from the certification steering committee (CSC), which covered the history of certification, the mechanics behind test setting and evaluation, and budget considerations. The program was conceived to be self-sustaining, and this year, mainly due to admirable budget management by the CSC, the program tipped the balance and is starting to show a bit of profit to offset EAC’s investment. This is truly a Good Thing!

Francophone members now have their own Agrément committee to consider how they would like to have their editing skills tested. The committee, under Sandra Gravel’s guidance, is working very closely with the CSC, which has offered its invaluable experience to help get Agrément on its feet. There’s still a long way to go, but the strong will of the francophone community will make this happen.

Next up was a report from the governance task force. You may not know this, but a new Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act comes into effect on October 17, 2014. As this Act governs EAC, this is important information. Failure to comply with all the articles of the new Act would lead to dissolution of the corporation, which would be a bad thing. Successful compliance means revising our constitution and adopting the newly revised constitution and related policies. But never fear, the NEC is on top of it. A task force has undertaken a preliminary review of our constitution, regulations and policies, and suggested changes that would bring us in line with the new Act. All EAC members will have a chance to look at these suggested changes and provide feedback before the task force goes on to produce a final version that the membership will need to ratify.

And then we all scurried off to catch planes, boats, buses and trains to various destinations…

Jacquie Dinsmore
NEC, Vice-president

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