When George Thirsk took over as executive director of Rockingham Community Action in October of 2005, he only had a slight inkling about the troubles he would face. If he had known the full extent of the organization’s problems, he might not have stepped in.

“It’s been very stressful. There’s been so much turmoil, confusion and indecision,” he said. “I just stepped in at the worst possible time.”

RCA is one of the state’s largest community action agencies. It provides help with everything from home heating and job placement assistance to Head Start and other educational programs. More than 63,000 people in 37 communities throughout the county receive some type of help from RCA, which operates on a $7.4 million annual budget.

But the last two years have been difficult for the non-profit. A string of longtime staff members left and the organization was without an executive director for almost a year. In that time, members of the board of directors picked up the slack, but that ultimately lead to more problems—including the United Way of the Greater Seacoast’s announcement that it would withhold more than $20,000 in funds from the agency unless problems were addressed.

That money constituted only a small part of RCA’s total budget, but it ultimately meant big changes for its leadership. An independent report by the Mid-Iowa Community Action agency, released in late 2005, recommended RCA’s board of directors resign. Since then, five of the eight board members have done so.

From the outside, it looked as though the internal strife at RCA began overnight. But according to Thirsk, the problems had been building for almost two years. While former board members agree that organizational issues had been mounting, they maintain that the board was unfairly painted as the cause of these problems. And though RCA has been able to maintain services for its clients throughout this ordeal, Thirsk believes more rebuilding needs to be done before the agency can fully move ahead.

the road to resignations
Scott Phillips was a member of RCA’s board of directors from 1996 to 2005. He was named “director emeritus” upon his departure in December 2005 and is still somewhat involved with the agency, although he has no official position on the board. The membership of RCA’s board is made up of people from three separate areas—the private sector, public officials, and low-income clients of the organization.

According to Phillips, the events that precipitated the MICA report and the subsequent resignation of RCA’s board started in 2000. The organization was going through a new financial director every year, Phillips said, and this high turnover rate lead to a disorganized bookkeeping system. Phillips, then chairman of the board, and the board’s treasurer began to take a more active role in keeping track of RCA’s finances. In 2002, Phillips was approached by then-executive director Steve Geller, who expressed concerns about his workload. Ultimately, RCA asked members of the non-profit Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) to do an assessment of RCA’s operations.

The report, completed in 2003, outlined a number of recommended changes for both the board and the executive director to institute. These changes included holding project directors accountable to a budget; increasing lines of communication between the board, the executive director and the staff and making sure the board was following its bylaws. And while the board was eager to tackle the changes, Phillips said Geller objected to the report.

During the next year, the relationship between the board and Geller became acrimonious, according to Phillips, and Geller left the agency in April 2004. The next executive director left after only a few months on the job. The board’s executive council then took over day-to-day operations of the agency. At the same time, a number of senior level managers, including the personnel director, development director, outreach director, housing and energy directors and Head Start director all left the organization for various reasons.

But to Thirsk, as the agency continued to transform, the board should have transferred some of its control back to staff members.

“In my … critical analysis, once (the board) corrected the situation, they should have backed off,” Thirsk said. But because the executive members of the board stayed on as executive directors, the division between the board and staff became muddled, and “it smacks of micromanaging.” And if the board is micromanaging the agency, “they’re not fundraising or (engaged in) public relations,” he said.
Departing board members Art Morrow, Ted Papoutsy, Herbert Bischoff and Martin Ferwerada did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

The staff turnover issues, as well as conflicts with board members, led to more strife among staff members. According to Thirsk, the issue wasn’t so much about the high level of turnover, but the way in which it was handled and how the board communicated these changes to the staff. If people don’t know what’s happening, he said, they will formulate their own ideas, which are usually worse than the reality.
“Special attention needs to be made to keep everyone in the loop,” Thirsk said.

Anonymous complaints about the board, along with the high rate of staff turnover, led the United Way of the Greater Seacoast in December 2005 to withhold about $22,000 in funding from the organization.
“When two local charity organizations are clashing, it’s not a good thing,” Thirsk said.

At the end of 2005, the state Department of Health and Human Services contacted the Mid-Iowa Community Action agency to conduct an independent audit of RCA. And while MICA’s final report was generally laudatory of the changes instituted by the board during the two previous years, the report ultimately recommended the board’s “leading members” resign within 90 days.

“The ‘turnaround’ of RCA will never be complete until the Board reconstitutes itself with new members who are not identified with the difficult changes that have occurred over the past two years,” the report stated.

silence in the face of bad publicity
Throughout these transitions, Phillips said the board was open and upfront with state officials, the United Way of the Greater Seacoast and other stakeholders.

“There wasn’t anybody who was trying to hide stuff,” he said.

Phillips believes the complaints that lead to the UWGS withholding funds came from employees unhappy with the changes recommended in the 2003 SCORE report. And because the exact nature of the complaints was unknown to board members, they didn’t have any real opportunity to respond, according to Phillips.

“I don’t think they wanted to be held accountable. They don’t want a budget,” he said.

Phillips also said MICA’s recommendation that the board resign was “illogical.” The 90-day deadline was arbitrary because the report wasn’t dated, he said, and there were no guidelines for how the board could reconstitute itself. Furthermore, there were no specific requirements about who on the board needed to resign. The “leadership” of the board was never identified in the MICA report, and Phillips said state officials initially requested the entire board resign.

With a nebulous deadline for the resignations and what seemed like a growing tide of negative opinion against the board, the board was silent about its plans. They did not issue any kind of public statement, and Thirsk said the board was not communicating with him, either.

That silence was a product of the board’s growing frustration, according to Phillips. Months before the resignations were called for, the board tried to get its findings about RCA’s financial and organizational difficulties into the public record at county meetings, but the information was not put into the record, according to Phillips. And even though the MICA report listed many positive changes that the board accomplished, media reports only focused on the resignations, Phillips said.

According to board member Diane Givetz, the board remained silent because it wanted to protect the agency’s image. Givetz and board member Heather McKay were asked to remain on with the organization, since neither were named specifically in any of the complaints against the board.

“We decided as a group we would take the high road and we wouldn’t (sling mud). Part of the turnaround was cleaning up the internal controls and issues like that, and we didn’t feel like the newspapers were a good thing to do that in. We were more concerned with the image of RCA,” she said.
If the board had acted quickly, things wouldn’t have been so bad, according to Thirsk. But the silence from the board, as well as their hiring of an outside lawyer, led staff members to worry about the stability of their jobs and the stability of the agency itself.

“From Jan. 26 on, they kept everything to themselves, and there was no communication at all, which is really difficult in itself,” Thirsk said.

This put Thirsk in a difficult position. Because he acts as a liaison between the board and the agency’s staff, Thirsk said he ultimately had to put himself squarely on the side of the staff. This move may have hurt his relationship with the board, he said, but it was necessary to keep the agency running.
One board member, Michael King, has not resigned. However, McKay and Givetiz have indicated to the UWGS that King will be fired from the board once a new board is formed.

Givetz, a board member since 2000, said the MICA report was a good, unbiased report and she agreed with the recommendations that were presented. However, she said the board was forced to resign too quickly and that she and McKay are being pushed to quickly reconstitute the board.

“I’ve seen this board go from a board that wouldn’t answer my questions to a board that held itself accountable and, I thought, was doing a tremendous job and worked well together,” she said.
In a statement released last week after the UWGS agreed to restore funding, King agreed with the positive assessments of RCA in the MICA report, but called the recommended resignations “inconsistent.”

“Funding agencies and those unhappy with change have leveraged their positions to hound the executive committee, and other board members, to prematurely resign en masse, out of frustration and to protect the agency,” King said in the statement.

the future of RCA
The lack of a stable board of directors has not yet caused serious problems for RCA’s daily operations. But Thirsk said he has grant requests and paperwork coming up that will need signatures from the board of directors, and without a board in place, it will be difficult to make progress in areas like fundraising.

State law requires the board have at least five members in order to conduct business. Unless three new members are appointed soon, the board may have to go to court in order to get special permission to continue operations. If that happens, Phillips said a judge could do anything from order the former board members to return to their post to scrapping the agency all together.

“It’s really a matter for the courts,” Phillips said. “The agency is not going to disappear any time soon.”
King expressed a similar sentiment. “It may now take Superior Court intervention to straighten out the mess that could have been avoided,” he said in his statement.

On Thursday, March 22, the UWGS restored $22,000 in funding to RCA, a sign that the agency’s troubles may soon be over.

“We recognize that (is a small part of the budget), but we don’t turn our nose up at anything,” Thirsk said.

 While some programs, like Head Start or the fuel assistance program, have federal and state funds dedicated to them, other services, like the Compass program, which helps adults and youth strengthen job and life skills, don’t have a specific funding source.

“Because those monies directly affect certain programs,” Thirsk said, “those programs could be eliminated (without grants).”

All the internal strife has not affected RCA’s services; however, Givetz thinks the situation should be a wake-up call to the boards of directors of other non-profits.

“It’s a call for boards to be doing their job, and not getting spanked when (they do their job),” she said.
While the day-to-day operations remain the same, Givetz said future iterations of the board may not be as trusting.

“It’s hard to let go of this history,” she said.

McKay and Gevitz have already interviewed about a half-dozen potential new board members. They’ve also interviewed two independent consultants, one of whom will be hired to help guide RCA through this transitional period. Thirsk expects new board members and the consultant to be in place by the end of the month.

“There are a lot of things I want to do as executive director, in terms of fundraising and other issues,” Thirsk said, including new ways to address child care, transportation and affordable housing services. “But a lot of these things take time and board support to do, and I haven’t had that. I’ve been focused on keeping the agency glued together.”