The Board of Amnesty Australia is continuing our work to ensure our governance structures best enable us to meet human rights challenges now and into the future.
We are fast approaching a meeting on 28 and 29 July – bringing together our Annual General Meeting voting delegates, Branch Presidents, and Board members – where we will seek to establish broad agreement on how best to move forward. Agreements reached at this meeting will be put to our Annual General Meeting which will be held in October.
To facilitate this complex process we are fortunate that Rosslyn Noonan, former New Zealand Human Rights Commissioner and Vice-Chair of AI New Zealand, is facilitating this work. Rosslyn started this process by conducting three teleconferences with the participants in the July meeting.
Activists have participated in energetic and productive discussion via an online forum considering possible proposals and refinements are being considered and tested. Much of our focus has been on the “Voice of Membership” – how do we ensure Amnesty Australia is the best member-led movement we can be. How do we ensure members effectively participate in making decisions about activism, campaigning, our role in the international movement, and our participation in civil society?
The Board proposal is that this will be facilitated through the Regional Activism Committees and the National Activism and Membership Committee. Members are currently having in-depth conversations about how we make these processes robust.
Thank you to all of you who have been involved in considering the proposals now being considered and refined—through the Branch AGMs in 2017 and 2018, through the roadshows earlier this year, through the on-line survey, and through direct feedback to Branch Committees and the board.
For full details on the new proposed model and other background documents, please visit the Rethinking Governance site.
