Create a Board Onboarding and Governance Toolkit

The New Hampshire Montessori Association Board is seeking a skilled volunteer to help us strengthen our governance practices by creating a clear and comprehensive board onboarding and orientation process. Our goal is to ensure new board members understand our mission, roles, expectations, and how we work together as a statewide Montessori community.

The volunteer will partner with our board leadership to:

-Develop a simple and effective onboarding process for new board members
-Create orientation materials, such as an introduction packet or slide deck
-Draft a governance guide that outlines roles, responsibilities, expectations, and best practices
-Recommend engagement or learning activities that help new members connect with our mission and fellow board members

Goal: A user-friendly onboarding toolkit that helps new members feel prepared, informed, and aligned with our organizational values from day one.

Our organization has been around since 2007 and in that time many of the same six people rotated through the different board positions. These founding members gave our community a place to connect, helped move us forward regarding teacher qualifications and did everything they could to get COVID protocols to all our Montessori schools.

Since I took over as president in 2023, we have been working on member engagement and community building. While we are making some gains we feel we are not where we would like to be.

As Montessori educators, we are taught, if something is not working in the environment, look within first. See what changes you can make before you move to the environment or the child and that is why we are asking for support with board development, we have looked within and realized we could use some support.

The board and I have been talking about ways to move our organization forward for over a year now and last winter we were introduced to Taproot and what you may be able to offer our small organization. We had discussed many areas and landed on starting from within as that is what we do as Montessori teachers. That set us on the path to progress our board forward.