Recruitment for civic positions is conducted almost entirely by understatement. It is not much. A couple of hours a month. We really need somebody.
That framing produces two failures at once, and both are worse than the honest version would have been.
Why understating fails twice
Capable people who suspect the estimate is low decline, correctly. They have been asked to accept an unspecified commitment by somebody who is evidently not being straight about its size, which is not an encouraging start.
And people who accept on those terms discover the real commitment within a few months and resign, which costs the body more than the vacancy would have and adds a departure to the record that makes the next recruitment harder.
An honest account filters differently. It loses people who were never going to stay and reaches the ones who can assess a real commitment and accept it deliberately.
The time, actually
The meeting is the smallest part and the only part anybody mentions.
There is the packet, read properly, which is an hour or two before each meeting. Budget season, which for most bodies is several additional evenings concentrated in a few weeks. Occasional matters that arise between meetings and cannot wait. A training obligation in some cases.
And the part nobody counts: being approached in the grocery store, at church, and at your children’s events, by people who want to raise something. That is not a burden to be resented — it is a substantial part of how a member learns what is actually happening — and it is real time and real attention that does not appear on any schedule.
The exposure
Three things that are not time and that people are entitled to know before accepting.
Public criticism, occasionally unfair. Decisions get attributed to individual members, sometimes inaccurately, in public and in print. It is part of the position rather than a sign that something has gone wrong, and it is genuinely unpleasant the first several times.
Duties that attach personally. Board members carry obligations that are theirs rather than the institution’s. What those are varies by body and is a proper question for the organization’s attorney, and nobody should accept a seat without having asked.
Constraints on ordinary conduct. Not discussing pending matters with neighbours who raise them. Not answering a question about a personnel matter that everybody in town is discussing. Being careful about communications with fellow members. These are counterintuitive to anybody whose professional habits formed in a private organization.
The part that is genuinely hard
Deciding against people you know, and then living among them.
Most of the work is procedural and unremarkable. A small number of decisions each year affect somebody’s livelihood or something they care about, and in a small community that person is not an abstraction. You will see them, and their spouse, and their children, indefinitely.
People who serve well describe this as the actual cost. Not the hours, which are manageable, and not the criticism, which is survivable. The accumulated weight of having decided things about neighbours.
Somebody told this in advance handles it considerably better than somebody who encounters it in their second year and concludes they were not suited to it.
What is received
An honest account has to include this side, and recruiters generally reach for civic duty, which motivates fewer people than they assume.
Influence over the specific things that shape a place you live. Not general influence — the particular decisions about the school, the water, the roads, the fire coverage.
An education in how governing actually works that is available nowhere else and that changes how somebody reads every institution afterward.
And a position in the community that is durable. Being one of the people who can be relied upon is a real thing in a small place, and it outlasts the term.
How to ask somebody
The request that gets accepted by a capable person is specific, bounded, and honest about all of the above.
Name the dates and the hours including the heavy months. Name the term length. Say why this person specifically. Say what the difficult part is. And say what the role does not require, which is frequently more reassuring than what it does.
Somebody who accepts on that basis has decided, and people who decide tend to serve out their term and stand again. Somebody who accepts a vague appeal has agreed to something neither party defined, and the arrangement is fragile from the first difficult meeting.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD