Council meetings should ideally be scheduled at the start of each presidential year to enable council members to block out time in their diary accordingly.
The frequency of your council meetings may vary and will depend on what works for your council – we recommend a minimum of four times a year, however you may choose to run meetings more frequently in order to meet council objectives.
It is the secretary’s responsibility to call all meetings held by the local institute. This responsibility may be delegated should an ‘acting’ secretary be appointed to service a particular committee (e.g. Sports and Social, Education etc.) Any ‘acting’ secretary must adopt the same procedures as the elected secretary and must pass a copy of the minutes of any meeting to the elected secretary for safekeeping and onward reporting as necessary. Once the date of a meeting has been agreed by the president (or appointed chairman), the secretary must give all members of the council or committee at least seven days notice, in writing via e-mail of the date, time and venue of the meeting, and must include an agenda or details of the purpose of the meeting.
The secretary is also responsible for ensuring that all meetings are quorate. Please check your own constitution for quorum details.
The president should act as chair of the meeting but in his/her absence, the deputy president or another member of council may be selected to lead the meeting.
An overview of a president’s typical responsibilities can be viewed here.
Under the terms of the CII’s draft local institute constitution, five members are required to form a quorum in order to pass proposed actions by council. Please check your institute’s constitutional requirements regarding how many members are required to be quorum.
To keep meetings interesting and your council members engaged, you should ensure every attendee has a role to play or at least something to say.
There are certain elements that are required as a matter of course for each of your council meetings, all council meetings should be recorded by the secretary and the minutes circulated to all council members in reasonable time following the close of the meeting. The minutes should be added as an agenda item at the next meeting and be signed off as an accurate reflection of what was discussed.
Key documentation for the effective running of your council meetings are accessible through the TOOLS tab once you log in through the My LI tab.