Mentoring for elected and appointed board members

[Queen B]

I attended an educational session last week where we were talking about boards.

One of the issues was education of the board.
How does that happen?

Well I have been giving that some thought.

The cities and county work under a shared set of State Statues and we have open meetings laws.

So here is my question. Since the board can not speak amongst themselves, what exactly would it hurt if they spoke to a mentor on another board. How wonderful would it be if they would agree to a mentor ship with another board, be it the next city or county.

I can see some red flags going up about not wanting bad commissioner passing along bad habits but in a perfect world it certainly would be helpful for new commissioners coming on the board to have somewhere they could seek knowledge.

We certainly come to each other for help and support, and different points of view.

Has this been tried anywhere?

Edited the thread title to be more specific. Thread titles should not be vague and must be specific to the topic, especially here in the professional subfourms. Thanks, mendelman

[KSharpe]

We've done educational training sessions with the boards, they seem to have been especially helpful in getting the board to understand what considerations cases should (and should not be) subject to.

[Downtown]

We've sent Board Members out to training (we have a pretty active MPO and Regional Planning Commission) and we've brought training into the Board - on a light agenda evening.

We're also trying to indoctrinate, er... inform new Planning Board members about their role and what kinds of things they should consider in the course of a meeting.