NOMCOMMPOOPERY

Yes, friends, the JFNA Nominating Committee has been doing its work in complete secrecy and will soon spring its confidential results upon us. I could preempt the Nominating Committee announcement but I will observe the demand of confidentiality they have imposed upon themselves. The following is just idle speculation:

     ~ The new Chair of the Executive, if I have heard right, is a great choice. Someone who has "done it all" -- a Federation Campaign Chair, a Large City Federation Chair, an active leader in both one of our major national partners and one of our international historic partners. Excluded from JFNA leadership for no apparent reason. This leader will demonstrate both independence and a desire to heal.

     ~ The only thing I know about the rumored new Board Chair is that he has the same name as my brother-in-law.  He has neither served as an Officer nor as a Chair of any critical JFNA body nor as a member of the Manning "Coordinating Council" nor has he left any footprint in the dust of  the current JFNA. And his name is spelled wrong in the JFNA 2011 Annual Report. I mention this non-service not as a negative but because it is a positive attribute of a new leader of a failing organization -- except the misspelling.

So, if what I heard is correct,  what we will have as the two new Chairs are leaders untainted by what has been going on. But, one is certainly knowledgeable even as that leader has been almost willfully excluded from any important role at JFNA by the current Chairs, and the current and immediate past CEOs. This historic nominating process  suggests to me that the current Board Chair either was unable to impose her will on this Nominating Committee to get one of her sycophants elevated (although who is that I am hearing will now be Treasurer and Chair of Budget/Finance?) to one or both of these offices; or she just wasn't around. (And, I can't believe it was the latter because in the history of every organization with which I have been involved, the sitting Chair has always sat ex officio on the Nominating Committee).

Someday soon the names will emerge in some public announcement...and I will prove to be prescient or totally misinformed.

Rwexler