Our hybrid has actually asked for those in the implementation realm to draft policies for their areas. The board’s written relatively few from scratch, and those are mostly rather high level. You’re right that the model expects staff. Maybe for a larger congregation, with more staff. Maybe.

Scott and others - My other beef with Carver surrounds its strict division of those who make policy, from those who must actually carry it out. Unless the policy makers are very sensitive to the realities of the staff/volunteers who carry out their policy, strict division is going to promote conflict and unrealistic expectations. The model requires the organization’s executive staff member to promote this understanding, but my experience with this in my UUA District, and at a former non-profit job, has been that only very gifted executives succeed in bridging the gap and promoting understanding between the policy makers, and the volunteers/staff.

For instance, there have always been policy-making boards which are not working boards, which is fine if you have the staff to make it work. (And, indeed, I’m staff in my day job and I make it work.)

Our fellowship adopted concepts–elements–of policy governance, but developed our own governance scheme and model. Among other things, we’re not large enough to have even made Carver Model policy governance make sense, I think… even for those who might have been inclined.

But my own take, as one of the architects of what we did, is that the Carver Model in some ways strains against our polity tradition, and in others… well… we’re churches, not businesses. There’s a key and critical difference, and the Carver Model doesn’t have space in it for THAT, that I can find. The answer seems to be to just apply the pure model, because it’s the model. And that’s not someplace I’m going.

So what we did was adopt the IDEA. The idea that the board works best setting policy and staying mostly out of the day to day governance–which we’ve pushed out to the committees and other structures. It’s done in a strongly ‘leveling’ tradition that is in accord both with our historic polity practices AND the traditions of the fellowship. It’s worked pretty well, so far–and we’re into our third year, with all the evidence being that we’re getting comfortable with it and working the kinks out.