I absolutely love this idea! We have a student advisory board that helps with script selection, and two of our alumni are invited to join our official Board of Directors every year. Typically, we invite students to join our boards based on a) their aspirations for the future and b) how well they'd fill a vacancy left by a student/alumni rotating off the boards.
For instance, we try to have at least one director, one actor, one designer, and one playwright on our advisory board. If the director's rotating off at the end of the 2018-2019 season, I'll usually invite the director who has the most prior experience with our organization to fill the vacancy. (So, for example, we just rotated off our artistic manager who was a 2013 alumni director, and so an invitation went out to our 2014 alumni director to join the advisory board.) When there's more than one candidate for the position, I'll either send out an email asking anyone who would be interested to fill out a brief application form, or I'll ask whoever our current Board of Directors feels would be most qualified.
For our actual alumni Board of Directors members, they need to go through a nomination and confirmation process. However, we generally invite students who we know are interested in starting their own theatre companies. This year, for instance, we invited two alumni to join our Board of Directors -- both of whom co-founded their own off-Broadway theatre companies with other students from our program. Usually these are students who are interested in eventually filing for non-profit status, so being on our Board of Directors usually introduces them to essential topics like board governance, budgeting and finance, and fundraising/development.
I'd recommend checking out
Royal Court's Youth Board, which is an exemplary version of what a youth board can be and accomplish. I had the opportunity to visit them a few months ago and was incredibly impressed by how much confidence and trust they had in their youth board's artistic/management skills. (They actually let the Youth Board curate almost an entire month of programming at the Royal Court -- the Open Court series. Such an outstanding program!)
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Victoria Chatfield
Executive Director
National Theatre for Student Artists
www.nationalstudenttheatre.orgvchatfield@nationalstudenttheatre.org------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 11-22-2017 09:04
From: Alyssa Curry
Subject: Teen Advisory Board
Our nonprofit company is wanting to create a teen advisory board. I'm curious if any of you have experience with a board or council like this. I'm more interested in your selection process. Did you invite certain kids, require applications, receive letters of reference? I want to stay far away from any claims of nepotism (which seems to plague some small theatre companies...especially youth companies).
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Alyssa Curry
Executive Director
Youth Theatre of the Bluegrass
Georgetown, KY
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