Hop on board the Speak About It board!
Speak About It is actively growing our board. We’re all about consent, so we thought that we would #JustAsk:
Hey, wanna join our board?
Speak About It uses theatre and dialogue to empower students to give and get consent, build healthy relationships, and make change in their communities. As a board member, you’ll join a group of people dedicated to vaulting Speak About It into the next decade and laying the groundwork for a more diverse, equitable, and just workplace through inquiry, critical feedback, and organizational guidance. We are looking for board and committee members who are down for a collective approach to these tasks and jazzed about our mission.
People join our board for all sorts of reasons: they might have a personal connection to our mission, they want to lend their myriad skills to a good cause, or maybe they just love talking about sex. Sometimes they’re looking for career development or the opportunity to try something new. Members often tell us that, like the students with whom we work, they learn transformative consent, communication, and boundary-setting skills during their time on the board. If you think you don’t “have the right qualifications,” throw that elitism out the window and shoot us a message! There are lots of ways to get involved and they all start with a conversation.
Because we're looking to add new voices to the table, here’s a little bit about the current table:
Currently, we have 8 awesome board members, most of whom live and work in Maine.
We also have 4 non-board committee members who serve on our Development, Finance, Governance, and Events Committees.
Our board has a wide range of knowledge and expertise in Law, Development, Education, Non-profit Governance, Healthcare, and the Arts.
78% of our board identify as white, whereas many of our staff and the students who we work with are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
62% of our board identify as Women and all our current board and committee members are cis-gender.
A quarter of our current board identity as Queer. A majority of our staff identify as Queer, and we know that the Queer students we serve feel particularly seen in our work.
All board and committee members attended a four-year college (38% are Bowdoin College graduates, specifically).
50% of board members are under 30 years old.
While our board is much younger than the average non-profit and this serves as an advantage for the student populations we serve, we want to work harder to ensure our board more appropriately reflects a world where all people feel welcome in the conversation about sex and consent.
An important part of institutional equity and committing to anti-racist sex education is building a board that can speak to the experiences of the students we serve. People of all identities, races, genders, ethnicities, locations, and skillsets are encouraged to reach out. You may have just the experience or enthusiasm that will help Speak About It thrive!
In the past few years, Speak About It has worked with more schools in the South, more schools in rural Maine, more community college students, and more BIPOC students and staff than ever before. Therefore, we want to make space on our board for folks who did not attend four-year institutions, folks with rural ties, queer and gender expansive folks, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. The board is taking time to inspect who feels comfortable on the team and is working to rebuild the group as a more inclusive space for people on and outside of the board. Most of all, we are striving for more people of historically marginalized identities to occupy more power, on our board and throughout nonprofit governance and policy.
In order to achieve this, we know we must daily combat systemic racism in which non-profits, ourselves included, are complicit. Here are a few concrete steps we are taking to move towards this goal: We are undertaking board-wide education. We are taking a hard look at our operational structures that can make it hard for folks to even consider joining a board. We’re inspecting when we meet, how we meet, and what we meet about. We are shifting the board to a more advisory role so that being a board member is a more manageable and accessible commitment. We are working on building relationships and easing hierarchies between board and staff. We reject the idea of this board (and any board) as a vessel of (white) knowledge and power. Instead, we want to value the expertise that each individual board member brings to the table, while trusting the staff and educators at Speak About It to use their experience in the field to run the show. We know we have lots more work to do moving forward.
If you’re thinking, “Wow, I like what these folks are doing and can’t wait to donate three to five hours a month to help!” Awesome, message us!
Here are a few specific skills we are seeking:
Do you live in or have meaningful ties to rural areas, both in Maine and beyond?
Are you an expert grant writer or do you have connections to foundations or philanthropic organizations?
Do you have banking or investment experience, even if it’s just your own portfolio? Are you hype about fundraising?
If so, reach out! Got something to offer not mentioned above? Great! You should still reach out! And if you think one of your dear friends, colleagues, or fellow community members would be a great fit, send them our way! We look forward to building a better board and a better tomorrow for Speak About It.