General Manager Search Update
The council made long strides at its March 12 meeting on the most important task for the council and the Co-op this year: to hire a General Manager (GM) who will meet the Co-op’s current needs. A search committee is working to identify the most promising candidates nationally, and the council will make the hiring decision.  

The council voted to change the charter to set the size of the GM Search Committee as the five active members. The committee was originally chartered with nine members, representing the stakeholder groups of member-owners, staff-level employees, management employees, and the council. That number quickly diminished to five active members, who report they have gelled into a working team who know, respect, and trust each other. All four stakeholder groups are still represented in the five-person committee. 

The council also approved a GM “position profile” that our recruiting firm, Gallagher Flynn, can use in posting announcements of the position nationally. The GM’s actual job description is to follow the Co-op’s many governance policies (a long set of documents!); the position profile distills those down to a pithy overview of the job.  

The council also clarified that we’d like the committee to send us up to three candidates initially, and if we don’t think any of them is a good match, we’ll ask the committee for more. We also authorized the committee to publicize the aggregate results of the surveys of members and staff about what qualities are important in the next GM.  

While the committee begins reviewing candidates, the council will be establishing its own processes for evaluating candidates and for giving the community a chance to meet the finalists. 

Council Standing Committee Structure Formed
How can one regular monthly council meeting, lasting a few hours, do the work of overseeing a $30 million grocery co-op with 10,000 members? By itself, it can’t. Even with our Policy Governance structure, which delegates operational decisions to the General Manager, the council needs to delegate some of its thinking and actions to committees. At its March 12 meeting, the council made significant progress towards setting up standing committees to do that work.  

Since the summer of 2023, the council has been operating with a bare-bones committee structure. The turnover of top leadership, plus committee charters written to expire at the 2023 Annual Meeting, meant that, in December, the new council began with just the Executive Committee (made up of council officers) and the still-being-formed GM Search Committee. In February, we reauthorized the charter and reappointed the dedicated members of the Hunger Mountain Co-op Community Fund Committee, so they could act in time to ask the council to transfer uncashed patronage refund checks to the committee to fund their grants supporting the local food system. (They did ask, and the council agreed.) 

Now the council has started forming standing committees to help us focus on the core functions of the council: engaging members, governance, and council education plus candidate recruitment. The structure was created at the March 12 meeting, and the council members who sign up for each of the committees will draft a charter describing their work, for approval by the full council. These committee charters will not expire, but we certainly expect them to evolve over time. We’ll be looking for non-council members for some of these committees, too, so watch this space for future announcements.  

We hope this experiment with these standing committees will help us do our work more effectively and help future councils hit the ground running with their work.  

Save May 17, 2024, for Council-hosted Dinner and Discussion
The council has for years hosted an annual Dinner and Discussion in the spring. Topics have included connections with local farmers and vendors; there’s good food from the Co-op and lively discussions among members. It’s a chance to bring people together and celebrate what’s good about our local food community. This year’s theme will tie into all the work on community resiliency being done in central Vermont, and what role the Co-op plays and could play in that work. Please mark May 17 on your calendars for this event at the Montpelier Senior Activity Center and look for more details between then and now.

—Carl Etnier, Council President