A Candidate's Experience
Since the start of my campaign with the Coalition to Reform LAB (LAB Reform) to become a director of the League of American Bicyclists, I have found the League to be more desperately in need of reform than I had previously suspected. I knew that the League's directors and officers were consistently unresponsive and uncommunicative, which had frustrated me earlier. I knew that the League often put out messages that seemed to undermine its mission. But, during my campaign, I discovered, beyond these problems, that the League's governance, which is nominally democratic, was quite dysfunctionally undemocratic in reality. The problems came in several forms:
These feeling inspired me, in an earlier draft of this article, to write much more forcefully than what you are reading here. After sending out my earlier draft to a few people and considering their feedback, I came to realize, after a full week of consideration that my rhetoric was obscuring the facts. It was humbling to resist expressing the full strength of my feelings, but I rewrote the article, attempting to take a cooler tone. How successful I was in this attempt could be debated, but, even so, I felt the need the include this note as a stub of what I removed from my earlier draft.
Before 1998, all directors were elected by the members (with a few idiosyncratic exceptions). The bylaws were changed in 1998 to allow 4 of the 12 directorships to be filled by appointment by the extant board of directors. This number was increased to 5 out of 12 in 2003, and to 7 out of 15 in 2010.
Beginning next year, each region of the country will no longer be granted a representative on the board of directors, elected by members from that region. All directorships will be at-large positions.
Candidates for elected directorships, in order to have their names put on the ballot, must be nominated by the extant board of directors, or by petition of the members. In 2003, the number of member endorsements needed for a successful nomination petition was increased from 50 members to 5% of the members (10% for a referendum petition). The League currently has about 15,000 members, 5% of which is about 750 members. For the upcoming election, the board nominated 8 of the 23 applicants, 4 of them incumbents, for 5 open directorships. That is less than 2 nominees per open position.
The League has not published vote counts for its elections since 2002, and was not consistent about doing so for many years before that, but it is almost certain that the approximately 400 members who endorsed the petition to nominate me, John Brooking, and Khalil Spencer, is more than the total number of ballots cast in any League election for many years.
The current bylaws also give the chair of the board of directors (currently Hans van Naerssen) excessive power beyond his or her power as a director, such as the authority to remove any member of a committee from that committee without the approval of other directors.
The League does little reporting on its projects, on the work of the board directors or its committees, or on the work of individual directors.
The League's specification of the petition process is vague and is not integrated with the rest of the process for selecting directors. This vagueness played a big role in the contention between LAB Reform and the League's leaders during the campaign.
The League's written policy on the use of its membership database imposes an excessively high barrier to members who wish to communicate important information about the League to other members. In particular, the policy requires any message to be approved by the board of directors in advance in order for it to be distributed to the members. This requirement is imposed under the guise of preventing libel. However, the risk of harm from libelous statements sent between members seems trivial compared to the actual harm of stifling communication between members. Moreover, this reasoning appears disingenuous in light of unsupported accusations of libel, an example of which I mention below, as well as a lack of any real problem of libel.
The board of directors violated the bylaws regarding the ratio of appointed directorships to elected directorships in making 2 of the 3 new directorships appointed and only 1 elected, rather than the other way around.
The board also voted on the governance committee's appointment and nomination recommendations without allowing the discussion period required by the bylaws.
Tim Young, the chair of the governance committee, did not announce the board's appointments and nominations until 09/08/2010, seven days after the scheduled date of 09/01/2010. His announcement did not acknowledge being late. This would have cut into our 45-day petition period if the board did not adjust the rest of the election schedule to compensate.
He claimed not to know anything about the petition process. This might seem reasonable until you take into account that he is the chair of the governance committee. If his claim is true, then he would seem to be derelict in his duty, since the chair of the governance committee, more than anyone else, should know about the petition process. Indeed, it is the the governance committee that is responsible for specifying this process. If his claim is false, then it would seem that he lied and thus deliberately interfered with the election.
He also made a comment that seemed to be intended to discourage me from pursuing a petition. He said that there were other ways I could serve the League besides serving as a director. I admit that an argument could be made for this comment being an innocent one, but that was not my impression. He did not refer to any of the reasons I gave in my application or earlier in the conversation for pursuing a directorship. My impression was reinforced when he repeated the comment later on.
Tim did not get back to me about the petition process until five days later, on 09/13/2010. When he did, he sent an email message that merely referred me to the League's bylaws and its written policy on the "Use of League’s Membership List by Members", which were vague, somewhat cryptic, and had been available to me earlier. If Tim had believed the bylaws adequately specified the petition process, he should have referred me to them earlier. He repeated the same comment that seemed to be intended to discourage me from pursuing a petition.
After receiving Tim's response and determining it to be inadequate, I immediately called him again to ask for more information. He said that he was busy and would have to call me back later. He never called me back, so I never got the opportunity to ask my question, let alone get answers. He did not even refuse to answer my questions, but allowed me to wait indefinitely for a callback. He was also uncooperative with John Brooking when John attempted to get information from him about the petition process. Eventually, we (the petition candidates) had to guess at the answers to our questions and act on those guesses.
When I finally called Tim again, on 10/04/2010, after John Brooking emailed him about sending a message to the members, on 10/02/2010, he refused to discuss the matter with me because I was not the one who had sent the initial message, despite clearly being a party to that message. I complained to him that he had not given me the opportunity to ask him about sending a message to the members when I asked about it, and other things, several weeks earlier. He answered that he thought the bylaws were adequate to answer my questions, and that referring me to them fulfilled his responsibility, despite my telling him earlier that the bylaws were not adequate to answer my questions.
Tim and Andy's excuse for insisting on this correspondence being sent on paper rested on the phrase “written statement” in the League's policies. They insisted that the phrase meant a statement printed on paper rather then sent in electronic form. However, this interpretation is not consistent with either of the two definitions of “written” that I am aware of. One is “hand-written” as opposed to “printed by a machine”. Of course, no one would take them seriously if they insisted on hand-written correspondence. The other is “recorded in text form” as opposed to “spoken”. This is the only reasonable definition in this context. There is simply no meaning of the common English word “written” that would include a statement printed on paper by a computer printer and physically transported to its recipient and exclude a statement sent by email.
In the same message, Andy asserted that content on the LAB Reform website was exemplary of what would not be allowed in a message to the members because it is either libelous or it makes the League vulnerable to libel lawsuits. He did not specify which statements of fact on the LAB Reform website he believed to be deliberately false and malicious.
In the end, we were unable to send our message to the bulk of the members. Having acquired 400 endorsements from the members we were able to contact, it seems overwhelmingly likely that we would have acquired endorsements from 5% of the members (about 750 endorsements) had we succeeded in contacting the bulk of the members.
I mentioned Andy's rule to one of our supporters, who I had recently recruited to the League. Frustrated, she wrote him to retract her membership. In his response to her, Andy blamed me for making “untested assumptions”. (Remember that we made our assumptions only after failing to get detailed information about the petition process.)
He also stated that
- unreasonable bylaws
- other unreasonable policies, written and unwritten, generally involving the withholding of information;
- deviations from bylaws and other written policies;
- nonsensical interpretations of bylaws and written policies by directors and officers;
- directors failing to perform their duties.
CONTENTS
- A Note on the Writing Process
- Bylaws, Policies, and Deviations Thereof
- My Correspondence with Directors and Officers
- What Now?
- Messages to Tim Young
A Note on the Writing Process
My primary purpose in writing this article is that of documentation, not persuasion. I have not attempted to rigorously demonstrate any conclusions. However, in considering my experience along with with that of my colleagues, I cannot help but reach some conclusions. As a lifetime League member, as someone who is passionate about cycling, and as someone who reveres the democratic process, I have very strong feelings about what I witnessed these past few months.These feeling inspired me, in an earlier draft of this article, to write much more forcefully than what you are reading here. After sending out my earlier draft to a few people and considering their feedback, I came to realize, after a full week of consideration that my rhetoric was obscuring the facts. It was humbling to resist expressing the full strength of my feelings, but I rewrote the article, attempting to take a cooler tone. How successful I was in this attempt could be debated, but, even so, I felt the need the include this note as a stub of what I removed from my earlier draft.
Bylaws, Policies, and Deviations Thereof
Bylaws
Over the past fifteen years, the League's bylaws have been amended several times so as give the board of directors more power and the members less, particularly over the selection of future directors and officers, imposing increasingly higher barriers to director candidates who lack the extant board's approval. I am told that these amendments were made without input from the members, without even making much of an effort to inform the members.Before 1998, all directors were elected by the members (with a few idiosyncratic exceptions). The bylaws were changed in 1998 to allow 4 of the 12 directorships to be filled by appointment by the extant board of directors. This number was increased to 5 out of 12 in 2003, and to 7 out of 15 in 2010.
Beginning next year, each region of the country will no longer be granted a representative on the board of directors, elected by members from that region. All directorships will be at-large positions.
Candidates for elected directorships, in order to have their names put on the ballot, must be nominated by the extant board of directors, or by petition of the members. In 2003, the number of member endorsements needed for a successful nomination petition was increased from 50 members to 5% of the members (10% for a referendum petition). The League currently has about 15,000 members, 5% of which is about 750 members. For the upcoming election, the board nominated 8 of the 23 applicants, 4 of them incumbents, for 5 open directorships. That is less than 2 nominees per open position.
The League has not published vote counts for its elections since 2002, and was not consistent about doing so for many years before that, but it is almost certain that the approximately 400 members who endorsed the petition to nominate me, John Brooking, and Khalil Spencer, is more than the total number of ballots cast in any League election for many years.
The current bylaws also give the chair of the board of directors (currently Hans van Naerssen) excessive power beyond his or her power as a director, such as the authority to remove any member of a committee from that committee without the approval of other directors.
Policies
In addition to the amendments to the bylaws, the board of directors has enacted policies, written and unwritten to complement them. Many of these policies involve the withholding of information from the members. For example, I already mentioned that vote counts for elections are not published. Also not published are applications for appointment or nomination and the reasoning used in selecting applicants for appointing or nominating. Strangely, some candidates who were not nominated received as many or more votes in the governance committee than some candidates who were nominated.The League does little reporting on its projects, on the work of the board directors or its committees, or on the work of individual directors.
The League's specification of the petition process is vague and is not integrated with the rest of the process for selecting directors. This vagueness played a big role in the contention between LAB Reform and the League's leaders during the campaign.
The League's written policy on the use of its membership database imposes an excessively high barrier to members who wish to communicate important information about the League to other members. In particular, the policy requires any message to be approved by the board of directors in advance in order for it to be distributed to the members. This requirement is imposed under the guise of preventing libel. However, the risk of harm from libelous statements sent between members seems trivial compared to the actual harm of stifling communication between members. Moreover, this reasoning appears disingenuous in light of unsupported accusations of libel, an example of which I mention below, as well as a lack of any real problem of libel.
Deviations
But, as I found out, bylaws and other policies do not tell the whole story. Some of the League's directors and officers violated the bylaws and policies when it suited their purposes.The board of directors violated the bylaws regarding the ratio of appointed directorships to elected directorships in making 2 of the 3 new directorships appointed and only 1 elected, rather than the other way around.
The board also voted on the governance committee's appointment and nomination recommendations without allowing the discussion period required by the bylaws.
Tim Young, the chair of the governance committee, did not announce the board's appointments and nominations until 09/08/2010, seven days after the scheduled date of 09/01/2010. His announcement did not acknowledge being late. This would have cut into our 45-day petition period if the board did not adjust the rest of the election schedule to compensate.
My Correspondence with Directors and Officers
The Petition Process
As I mentioned above, the League's bylaws and other written policies regarding the petition are quite vague. Tim Young's email message of 09/08/2010 about the board's appointments and nominations contained no information about the process. After receiving his message, I immediately called him and asked about it.He claimed not to know anything about the petition process. This might seem reasonable until you take into account that he is the chair of the governance committee. If his claim is true, then he would seem to be derelict in his duty, since the chair of the governance committee, more than anyone else, should know about the petition process. Indeed, it is the the governance committee that is responsible for specifying this process. If his claim is false, then it would seem that he lied and thus deliberately interfered with the election.
He also made a comment that seemed to be intended to discourage me from pursuing a petition. He said that there were other ways I could serve the League besides serving as a director. I admit that an argument could be made for this comment being an innocent one, but that was not my impression. He did not refer to any of the reasons I gave in my application or earlier in the conversation for pursuing a directorship. My impression was reinforced when he repeated the comment later on.
Tim did not get back to me about the petition process until five days later, on 09/13/2010. When he did, he sent an email message that merely referred me to the League's bylaws and its written policy on the "Use of League’s Membership List by Members", which were vague, somewhat cryptic, and had been available to me earlier. If Tim had believed the bylaws adequately specified the petition process, he should have referred me to them earlier. He repeated the same comment that seemed to be intended to discourage me from pursuing a petition.
After receiving Tim's response and determining it to be inadequate, I immediately called him again to ask for more information. He said that he was busy and would have to call me back later. He never called me back, so I never got the opportunity to ask my question, let alone get answers. He did not even refuse to answer my questions, but allowed me to wait indefinitely for a callback. He was also uncooperative with John Brooking when John attempted to get information from him about the petition process. Eventually, we (the petition candidates) had to guess at the answers to our questions and act on those guesses.
When I finally called Tim again, on 10/04/2010, after John Brooking emailed him about sending a message to the members, on 10/02/2010, he refused to discuss the matter with me because I was not the one who had sent the initial message, despite clearly being a party to that message. I complained to him that he had not given me the opportunity to ask him about sending a message to the members when I asked about it, and other things, several weeks earlier. He answered that he thought the bylaws were adequate to answer my questions, and that referring me to them fulfilled his responsibility, despite my telling him earlier that the bylaws were not adequate to answer my questions.
"Written" Correspondence
Both Tim Young and Andy Clarke, the League's president, insisted on particular correspondence being sent on paper rather than by email, despite the overwhelming majority of the League's business, including the election itself, being conducted online. This included the submission of our petition and our request to send a message to the members. It included the full list of members, which we considered requesting for the purpose of distributing a message to the members about our petition. The list would have been accessed and formatted on a computer at the League office and printed onto a thick stack of paper that would have then been sent to one of us and re-entered into a computer. We would have had to pay a substantial fee for this “service”, which could have been performed by email with no work and no expense. The correspondence that Tim and Andy insisted on being sent on paper also included the distribution of our message to the members. This would have cost us several thousand dollars, which was prohibitive, and would have taken about a week to deliver, time that we did not have because much of the nominal 45-day petition period was wasted waiting for Tim's callback. John Brooking compiled a timeline of our activities to give a clearer picture of this.Tim and Andy's excuse for insisting on this correspondence being sent on paper rested on the phrase “written statement” in the League's policies. They insisted that the phrase meant a statement printed on paper rather then sent in electronic form. However, this interpretation is not consistent with either of the two definitions of “written” that I am aware of. One is “hand-written” as opposed to “printed by a machine”. Of course, no one would take them seriously if they insisted on hand-written correspondence. The other is “recorded in text form” as opposed to “spoken”. This is the only reasonable definition in this context. There is simply no meaning of the common English word “written” that would include a statement printed on paper by a computer printer and physically transported to its recipient and exclude a statement sent by email.
A Message to the Members
When John Brooking contacted BrightKey, Inc., the League's fulfillment house, about having them send a message about our petition to the League's members, Andy Clarke scolded him for it, as if it was a breach of ethics. The League's written policy on the use of the membership database offers three options: (1) accessing it in-person at the League office, (2) purchasing a print-out from the League, and (3) “engaging the services of the fulfillment house which is under contract with the League...” Andy told John that John had no business contacting BrightKey, and that all communication with BrightKey should be made through him (Andy). This contradicts the stated purpose of the fulfillment house. John had every right to contact a company whose services he was considering engaging.In the same message, Andy asserted that content on the LAB Reform website was exemplary of what would not be allowed in a message to the members because it is either libelous or it makes the League vulnerable to libel lawsuits. He did not specify which statements of fact on the LAB Reform website he believed to be deliberately false and malicious.
In the end, we were unable to send our message to the bulk of the members. Having acquired 400 endorsements from the members we were able to contact, it seems overwhelmingly likely that we would have acquired endorsements from 5% of the members (about 750 endorsements) had we succeeded in contacting the bulk of the members.
Petition Signing Eligibility
Finally, as we were preparing to submit the petition, Andy informed us that anyone who had not been a member since 09/13/2010 would not be considered a qualified signer of the petition. All signatures from members who had joined the League since then would be ignored. The effect of this was not large; only about 20 signatures were excluded on this basis. However, This rule does not follow from the bylaws or any written policy that I have seen, such as the information about the election published on the League's website. It was also not expressed earlier by either of the directors I spoke to about the petition, Bill Hoffman and Tim Young. Remember that Tim Young is the chair of the governance committee and that I asked Tim about the petition process and that three times he pointed me to the bylaws and would not say anything more.I mentioned Andy's rule to one of our supporters, who I had recently recruited to the League. Frustrated, she wrote him to retract her membership. In his response to her, Andy blamed me for making “untested assumptions”. (Remember that we made our assumptions only after failing to get detailed information about the petition process.)
He also stated that
[i]n every election we have run for the board as long as I have been on the staff, the board has determined a set date at which the eligibility of members to vote is set – it is always at the start of the election cycle, and in the case of the petition process it has to be at the start of the process so we can determine how many names are needed to qualify.His statement defies the following facts.
- As I said before, the deadline was apparently never published.
- He mentions only a deadline for eligibility to vote, not to sign a petition. I suspect that we were the first petition candidates in many years.
- Petitioners need not inform Andy or the board in advance of their intent to petition, so there is nothing to trigger a count of the members in advance.
- The task of determining, on any given date, the number of members as of any given preceding date is trivial. There is no reason not to set the deadline at the date the petition is submitted. This is the most natural choice.
- Despite me and John Brooking sharing our intention to petition with Tim Young and our asking him for details of the petition process, we were not given a definitive count of the members as of any particular date until after we had submitted the petition, read Andy's analysis of it, and then specifically asked him for the count.
- The ability to recruit new members is an asset for a director. Director candidates should be rewarded for recruiting new members.
What Now?
We have secured much support in this campaign. As I said before, we secured endorsements from more members than have probably voted in any League election in many years. Moreover, these endorsements, on the whole, came from the League's most active and valuable members. Many of those who signed our petition were League Cycling Instructors. Some are from lifetime members, former directors, and even former League presidents and current director nominees. I hope that, even though we failed to fulfill the League's formal signature requirement, this support will help to inspire reform in the League of American Bicyclists.Messages to Tim Young
After publishing this article, I pointed the board of directors and some officers to it, hoping that they would comment. My goal was to initiate an open discussion about the League's governance. I received very little response. However, I did receive a very brief comment from Tim Young. This comment led me to respond with some points that I thought were worth sharing.Dear Tim.-
Needless to say, there has been some contention between us during the past few months. My attempts to communicate with you have been quite frustrating, and I see no reason why that should be.
I wrote an article documenting my experience of the campaign. You can read it at <http://cycles.eli-damon.info/2010/11/02/a-candidates-experience.aspx>, if you have not seen it already. I must warn you that it is critical of you. But I wrote the article to start a discussion, not end one. My first impulse was to issue a harsh condemnation, but my cooler-headed colleagues convinced me that doing so would close communication, not open it, that it would be better to calm down, withhold judgement, and simply report on my experience.
I hope that you will read it and give a thoughtful response. It could lead to a productive discussion, not just between us, but throughout the League community. I believe that such a discussion is desperately needed. There has been a terrible lack of communication in the League community, and that needs to change. Activism cannot be effective without communication.
Please feel free to contact me by phone, email, or through comments on my blog.
Eli
Honestly Eli, I don't know how to respond to this. Please consider the reality that other people were more qualified than you to serve on the League Board and move on.-
Tim.I was hoping that Tim would reply, but so far he has not.
I made a number of points. You have not addressed any of them. None of them relate to my qualifications, so I don't know why you are bringing up that topic now.
But since you did bring it up, I have seen no evidence of or arguments for your claim that other candidates were more qualified. I did ask you about that, but I did not get much of an answer, and very little information has been made available to me.
You seem to be suggesting that becoming a director was my end goal. I chose to run for a directorship because I saw some problems that needed to be fixed. I would rather they have been fixed without my effort, but I did not expect that to happen. Now I see that the problems are worse than I thought. This is not about me. It is about the League's governance. My ego is certainly not bruised by my failure to become a director. I am upset about what the attempt to become one revealed about the League.
I implore you to take responsibility for the kind of operation you run. Your behavior over the past few months was really out of line with your duty. I urge you to join the conversation that has been going on all around you this whole time, since long before I became involved. In your position of leadership, you should not just be participating in the discussion, you should be leading it. Be a leader, Tim.
Eli
Wow, Eli. What a tour de force of documentation.
It is a shame that the these people enjoy their power trip so much that they would rather not be open and honest with their members.
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It should never have come to this. It appears that power can corrupt, but this is corruption that can an will hurt the membership if it is not stopped abruptly and soon. When the leadership thinks that they are no longer accountable to their members, they need to be removed from office. I am sorry that you and others have had to go through unnecessary difficulties to get this done, but I am very thankful you did. It is time to take back the League and we will.
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Eli,
Thank you for your efforts to communicate clearly and your passion to make a difference through the work of LAB. Of course I don't know the whole story, but it appears that the leadership is quite glib. This fits with my experience of the organization being a bit "old school" when I first attended a meeting while a high school student in Tucson (~1992). As a current member of two boards, I must admit if you asked the same standard from us, we'd come up short (in particular following bylaws regarding dates). I imagine that the directors are not compensated for their time so it is difficult to feel like they can really affect significant change. That said, I believe that your passion and care would be well received by the other members of the organization and you are in a strong position to lead. I commend your efforts and encourage you to stick to your message of opportunity for the organization.
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Hi Ross. Thanks for you message. Of course, some actions of the League's leaders that I mentioned would not seem like a big deal if considered in isolation. It is the combination that makes them significant, along with the leaders' failure to comment.As you said, you don't have the whole story. This is because Tim Young and Andy Clarke and others have not deigned to share their side of the story. At this point, my goal is to have an open discussion about the League's governance, but nothing I have tried so far has elicited a real response. You would think that if the leaders really thought that they were right and I was wrong, then they would not be so reluctant to say so and explain why, point by point.
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Ross, just a quick note: In 1992, the League board was all-elected. While there were Politburo-like scandals from time to time in those previous decades, I think the current situation is a different order of scandal. There is an Animal Farm-like duplicitous arrogance in the board's insisting that what they do now is some sort of legitimate election.
Another distinction I would make is one of mission. For all its imperfections and failings, the League of 1992 was really trying to represent cyclists' best interests; it had cycling events that attracted thousands of people; it worked hard to involve all members in advocacy; it had dozens of programs to involve and benefit members. The League of today is suspicious of member involvement (unless they're "approved" members), has no events to bring members together, and doesn't have the programs it used to have. It has been reborn as "send us money so we can lobby for pork -- and we send you a magazine for your coffee table." The education program survives as an unwanted vestige, in conflict with the lobbying for pork.
I'm not defending whatever was said to you in 1992, but just saying that, taken as a whole, the League was FAR more open to members then than it is today.
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I keep mumbling that the League has to model itself on something like the National Rifle Association, which has great local and regional organizations and sponsored events and which has an almost maniacal dedication to protecting and expanding the rights of its members. Thus it draws in members because they see its value in an obvious way. 4 million members. We have 20 thousand. Good grief.
http://membership.nrahq.org/message.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association
When I did a considerable Google search, it appears that the petition method to get on the NRA Board requires far fewer signatures than LAB.
Now I know my suggestion that we use the NRA as a model will probably offend some. Sorry...but reality is reality.When LAB has 4 million members, I'll shaddup.
The problems I have with internal Board vetting of candidates are substantial. Aside from the lack of organizational democracy, there is the lack of fresh air in the board room. I suspect that even if there is not an overt plan to exclude those who disagree with the Board, there is a just as worrisome tendency for the existing Board to conclude that the valuable traits to request in prospective Board members are the ones they see in the mirror, i.e., to be able to hustle money from government and industry, i.e., the bike biz and urban planners. So you get a self-perpetuating mission.
I don't claim those on the Board don't have valuable skills, but if being a cardboard cutout of the current board is the overriding driver, than those special interests currently in power will take precedence over individual cyclist's needs indefinitely.
There has to be some balance, right?
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Hi Khal,
"even if there is not an overt plan to exclude those who disagree with the Board"
You're too kind. Of _course_ there is such an overt plan!
I think looking at the NRA's effectiveness is smart. One need not discuss whether one agrees with the NRA's mission to examine its effectivenss, procedures for getting on the board, how it handles internal dissent, and so on.
I have long used another example: the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). Well over half the pilots in the country belong to AOPA, because the member benefits and advocacy are so compelling. AOPA's board of directors is elected by those members who show up at an annual meeting I've never bothered to attend.
When I was on the LAB board (1997-2001), other board members -- notably Earl Jones and later Chris Kegel -- joined voices with then-executive directors Jody Newman and Elissa Margolin in another anti-member issue: keeping members from any meaningful role in speaking for the organization. They used the remarkably stupid argument that I'd have more clout at a local meeting saying I was from a local organization than from the League.
I can just imagine the NRA telling would-be volunteers, "You'll have more clout saying you represent the Ridge Valley Gun Club than saying you represent the NRA." And then I burst out laughing.
All of this was part of LAB's desire to NOT mesh the national office's goals with the center of gravity of the members' roles (on inconvenient issues like road rights versus pathway pork).
These other organizations DO involve local members in advocacy. At the time I also looked at the
Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and others. I think all of them wanted members to volunteer as local spokesmen for the organization's policies. At least one had a form on the web site to sign up to be a volunteer -- and this was in the very early days of the web.
John Schubert
Limeport.org
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The gun folks I have spoken to seem more open to accepting individuals speaking out. I was not a member of the Hawaii Rifle Association (HRA), but once wrote a long op-ed piece in the local newspaper defending 2nd Amendment rights and rhetorically disemboweling a local professional writer. The next week, somewhat to my surprise, I was made an honorary HRA member.
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