December Endings

With the calendar year ending in less than a month now, so too ends the tenure of the current board of directors on the Kansas City Irish Fest. Long time Board members Ed Scanlon and Ronan Collins will ride off into the sunset...as board members anyway on December 31st. Expect to see a lot more of Ronan as he's freed from the confines of the Irish Fest office and becomes more involved in the entertainment end of the festival. Expect to see more of Ed up in the sponsor area putting a dent in our beer supplies and telling anybody who'll listen how much better things ran when he was president. I know this because as a former Irish Fest president myself, I do it all the time. New board members, to be named soon, will take their spots at out early morning meetings after January 1st.

I thought in this transitory time you might be interested to know how this thing is structured. I'm probably wrong in thinking that, but what the hell. Nothing else going on.

The leadership of our event works under mandatory term limits of 5 years except for the original members who are being staggered off the board (and sometimes staggering off, too) so as not to lose the entire experienced bunch all at once. A year from now Ed Follis and Mary Alice Beebe will follow the retirement trail blazed by Bob Sullivan, Kyle Kelly and Pat O'Neill. And after the 2010 fest wraps up I'll give up my seat. Why force out experienced leaders, you ask? Okay you probably didn't ask but I'll tell you anyway. As much as some of us would love to stay on this job forever, we believe it's important for the future growth and health of Irish Fest to keep a steady influx of new ideas, new energy and new faces. Retiring board members who care to can apply for reinstatement after sitting out two years, though interestingly nobody has yet. I wonder if they know something we don't know. New board members can come from within (former Site Host chair Barney Walsh last year) or without (engineer and construction executive Rory O'Connor a few years back) and are all nominated and voted on by the sitting board. Board officers are also nominated and voted on by the sitting board.

And what about Keli Wenzel you may or may not be asking. What's her deal? Keli was hired by the board to serve as our executive director. She's our one paid employee and serves an open ended commitment at the discretion of the current board. She doesn't have a vote in board decisions requiring votes. She does however do the work of all the rest of us combined.

Individual committees, the real nuts and bolts working of the festival are run by an army of chairmen and women who report to board, set up their own committee structures and wrangle the volunteers who work for them. They too, each one, do way more work than any of us boardies, who now that I think about it have a pretty cushy gig, except for those 7:00 A.M. meetings every two weeks. Do I really have to leave in two years?

So that's the basics. If any of it sounds good to you, here's what you do: start volunteering. Work in a lot of areas or excel in just one. Learn the business. Look for opportunities to fill committee chair vacancies, or identify a festival need and establish a committee to meet it. Or get involved in the Irish community outside Irish Fest. Exhibit skill sets and enthusiasm that will get you noticed by the directors when board vacancies come up. And then if you're lucky you can join this esteemed crew and five years from now we'll be kicking you to the curb too.