Governance Committee

The Governance Committee of the Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs Partnership serves and steers SBF/MSMA in matters related to the internal governance of this Partnership and provides SBF/MSMA with intellectual leadership. The Governance Committee is composed of individuals tied to academic institutions, Freelance Artist-educator Consultants (FACs), and Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP). As labour equity is a value that informs all of SBF/MSMA’s work, members of the Governance Committee with institutional affiliations are Governance Co-directors and those without salaried institutional positions are paid Governance FACs or HQP.

The Governance Committee works in close collaboration with SBF/MSMA’s Co-directors, its Governance Study, and its Student Caucus, the latter of which is in the process of being created (planned for early 2025) by two student participants in SBF/MSMA, namely Irina Betzabhe Gonzalez Guadarrama and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho. Once a freelance artist caucus and a contract faculty caucus are created (planned for 2025-2026), the Governance Committee will also collaborate closely with these caucuses. The Governance Committee has a subcommittee dedicated to addressing conflicts, harms, and complaints across the project using a restorative approach as defined in the work of Jennifer Llewellyn called the Conflict Resolution, Complaints Management, and Harm Mitigation Committee.   

Broadly stated, “[g]overnance encompasses the system by which an organisation is controlled and operates, and the mechanisms by which it, and its people, are held to account.” (Governance Institute of Australia). It refers to the system by which an organization operates, and of structures, practices, and policies that an organization has established to:

• assign decision-making authority, accountability, and processes; 
• establish an organization’s strategic direction;
• oversee the accomplishment of its mandate;
• monitor its ethics and mitigate its risks;
• report on its performance in achieving its mandate and respecting its commitments to steer ongoing improvements.

Overall, the work of the SBF/MSMA Governance Committee is to:

1. Provide advice to project Co-leadership about aspects of the social, organizational, financial, and legal governance of SBF/MSMA;
2. Review, approve, and enact governance policies developed by the Governance Study ;
3. Respond to complaints, conflicts, and harms within SBF/MSMA in collaboration with the Conflict Resolution, Complaints Management, and Harm Mitigation Sub-Committee; 
4. Advise on select Governance Study activities across the project including workshopping the prototype of the governance framework created by the Governance Study.

Individual members of the Governance Committee also collaborate with the Governance Study on an ad hoc basis to workshop specific policies, protocols, or governance tools based on their interest, involvement, and capacity. 

Guiding values of SBF/MSMA that the Governance Committee has been charged with upholding are:

• Enacting the Utility, Self-Voicing, Access, Interrelationality (USAI) Research Framework developed by the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC). The USAI Research Framework holds that: 
  1. “research needs are based on community priorities” (Utility);
  2. “research, knowledge, and practice are authored by communities that are fully recognized as knowledge Creators and Knowledge Keepers” (Self-Voicing);
  3. “research fully recognizes all local knowledge, practice, and experience in all their cultural manifestations as accessible by all research authors and Knowledge Keepers” (Access);
  4. and “research is historically situated, geo-politically positioned, relational, and explicit about the perspective from which knowledge is generated” (Interrelationality) (OFIFC). 
• Respecting labour equity (minoritized and precariously employed participants undertake work that benefits them and are compensated appropriately; salaried participants protected by tenure and other privileged positionalities undertake service and advocacy).

Guiding values the Governance Committee has identified for its work are:

• Relationship-building,
• Developing a shared understanding of the project,
• Developing a restorative way of working together.

In Phase 1, the Governance Committee membership includes Monia Abdallah, Tau Bui, Jill Carter, Shawn DeSouza-Coehlo, Irina Betzabhe Gonzalez Guadarrama, Jennifer Llewellyn, Signy Lynch, Pallina Michelot, Carla Rice, Sarah Robbins, Jennifer Roberts-Smith, and Deneh’Cho Thompson.