This week, ILCA is launching a new, occasional series featuring the voices of ILCA board members. We hope you will learn about the people behind the many decisions the board makes every day to bring ILCA closer to our core values of knowledge, equity, and diversity.
ILCA strives to be transparent to our members.
Wondering about the priorities for ILCA Board of Directors? Or actions we’ve taken or decisions we’ve made? The minutes of the Board of Directors meetings are one way to keep up with ILCA’s actions.
Making the minutes readily available to members and making other key documents easier to find on our website are two ways the ways the ILCA board is working towards transparency with our community.
I have been an ILCA member for over 10 years, and have been honored to serve as Secretary of the Board of Directors for almost 5 years.
As Secretary, it is my job to report the Board’s decisions in minutes of our meetings. While the recommendation for organizational meetings is to simply report the actions and motions made at the meeting, I almost always include some of the background or discussion behind those actions and motions to further inform members about those decisions.
The minutes are reviewed for accuracy and approved by the Board. Additionally, I write minutes for the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the association, which is held each July at the Conference. The minutes from the previous year are presented there and approved by members.
If you haven’t found the minutes or other organizational documents on our new website, I’d like to guide you to them. You can visit them now by clicking HERE.
To locate them later, click on “about ILCA” on the website and scroll to Board of Directors. You will find the content at the bottom of the page here:
Full public access is available for:
Bylaws – these are the rules by which the association is governed.
Organizational Chart – showing how the different parts of the association fit together, and how we work with outside organizations.
Strategic Map – identifies the vision, mission, core values, goals, and objectives of the association, and generally guides all Board decisions.
Form 990 – an annual reporting form that certain nonprofit organizations in the United States of America must file with the Internal Revenue Service, and which provides information on the organization’s mission, programs, and finances.
Lisa Mandell, MBA, IBCLC, Secretary, ILCA Board of Directors
Additionally, ILCA members have access to all the minutes of Board meetings that I mentioned previously, from January 2015 on. We are working to add the Electronic Motions and Actions documents (a record of decisions made on the online platform used by the Board between meetings), and minutes of the Annual General Meeting (AGM). Also here are the reports of our financial audits for the last several years. An audit is an independent examination of a nonprofit’s financial records by a licensed certified public accountant; it is an examination of the financial records, accounts, business transactions, accounting practices, and internal controls.
I hope that access to this information helps you to feel more informed as a member of ILCA. The ILCA Board of Directors is committed to transparency – that is, we want our members to know what decisions we are making, and why. We do this work for you, and as an effort to advance the International Board Certified Lactation Consultant profession worldwide through leadership, advocacy, professional development, and research. This will help us to achieve our vision of world health transformed through breastfeeding and skilled lactation care.
Love me some non-profit organizational transparency of governance. Thank you ILCA!