Two and a half years ago, 88 percent of APsaA's voting members gave the Task Force on Reorganization (TFoR) a mandate to devise a legal, legitimate, and effective governance for the Association. The mandate's parameters were specific. Among other things it called for a smaller board of directors and a clarified relationship of the Association to its educational arm. It outlined a process by which the task force was to design a governance for the Association based on simple majority votes of the task force. This structure was to be put in bylaws language by the task force, in cooperation with the Joint Committee on Bylaws, the National Office staff, and the Association's attorney, and then put to a vote of the members. The task force was to complete its work by June 2006 and “sunset.”
The task force included members with diverse opinions and repeatedly sought and used input from anyone who was willing to provide it. The resulting process was sometimes acrimonious, often emotionally charged, and gradually productive. A consensus never emerged on several important issues, but people with very diverse views often came to see opposing views as legitimate. We produced a report of our recommendations. Our understanding of the mandate was that this report would be transformed into bylaws language by the Association's attorney, reviewed by the various APsaA groups working on the bylaws, and presented for the membership's vote.
At the January meeting the Council presented its work to BOPS and Council for discussion. Even before the task force began its work it was strongly criticized by a group of members who believed the task force's composition prejudiced it to support an educational arm isolated from the membership's control. When the task force, consistent with its original mandate, recommended a smaller board of directors some members of the same group lead a vigorous opposition to removing the directors' functions from the current Executive Council. They also asserted that since they were certain the proposal would not achieve the two-thirds vote required for adoption, it would be a waste of Association funds to translate the proposal into bylaws language. Other Council members spoke in favor of the proposal or offered relatively minor revisions. Some thought it was too complicated. Several councilors had no time to speak and the task force chair was not allowed to respond. The resulting stormy Council meeting passed a resolution calling for the task force to report back to it in June. (It is unclear whether the Council understood that the task force was scheduled to sunset in June.) The Executive Committee interpreted this resolution to mean that no funds should be provided to pay legal fees for task force work.
The task force believed that having developed a detailed knowledge of the issues surrounding reorganization and heard the views of the wide range of members, we could be useful to other groups within the organization by sharing that information as those groups attempted to address the problems of governance.
The task force was puzzled about how to proceed. We could not proceed to crafting bylaws without funding for legal assistance and so we could not complete our mandate. Several members were disheartened. It seemed to some of us that a majority of members of Council and Executive Committee were simply rejecting the membership's mandate. It was unclear what the Council as a whole would have regarded as a more satisfactory proposal.
The task force decided to report back that we had considered the arguments made in Council, all of which, in fact, had been discussed extensively over the previous two years. There was no practical way to address the claim that the task force was “stacked” in favor of BOPS. (In my view this allegation was belied by the very diverse opinions of its members about education and governance.)
Our recommendation remained unchanged. Concerning a place for Science and Scholarship, the group had given this serious thought, and decided that while we supported and anticipated an increased role for Science and Scholarship in APsaA's future we did not believe this should be cast as part of the governance structure, especially since our proposal had already been criticized as too complicated.
Some task force members were willing to continue to work on the proposal; others were not. It seemed particularly disturbing to some that two years of hard work had seemed to be discarded in an hour of raucous discussion in Council that reflected little of the careful thought that had gone into our proposal.
Stephanie Smith, M.A., L.I.C.S.W., vice-chair of the Task Force on Reorganization, currently chairs the Committee on Preparedness and Progress. She is faculty and a supervising child and adolescent analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East.
The task force believed that having developed a detailed knowledge of the issues surrounding reorganization and heard the views of the wide range of members, we could be useful to other groups within the organization by sharing that information as those groups attempted to address the problems of governance. We let our availability to serve as sources of information in this regard be known. Perhaps because this offer was misunderstood as an effort to press for passage of the task force's proposal it was vigorously rejected and the task force was not invited to any of the several discussions of reorganization that occurred in the following months.
After careful study the majority of the task force believe that steps need to be taken promptly to reorganize the governance of the Association.
As an alternative to the task force's proposal a group of members identifying themselves as “Alliance 21” put forward the “ASAP” proposal which is essentially a recommendation to proceed slowly in a stepwise fashion to reorganize APsaA. It proposes initially minimal changes to bring the Association in compliance with New York State law, that the Council continue as the board of directors and that BOPS successor be a committee of the corporation, responsible to the Council like other committees.
Another group consisting of the president, president-elect, secretary (soon to be president-elect) and the chair of BOPS collaborated to put forward a set of bylaws that were in some regards similar to the task force proposal. These bylaws differed from the task force's proposal mainly in that the Board of Directors will be directly elected by the membership, the educational function will be primarily located in a committee of the corporation, but accreditation and certification will be conducted through a subsidiary corporation, and there will be a Council on Science and Scholarship. This Renew the American proposal will be voted on by the membership in the fall.
Other proposals, including one for another task force have been put forward.
Early in our work, the task force decided to take no position on plans other than our own and so, as a group, we take no position on any of the proposals.
So where does this leave us? After careful study the majority of the task force believe that steps need to be taken promptly to reorganize the governance of the Association. We stand by our recommendations. We also hope that the information and thought that went into our considerations will be used as others struggle with this question. The next step depends on whether or not the membership approves the Renew proposal. If this does not happen, the task force's work remains available for consideration in its own right or as input into further efforts at reorganization.