Nominations for the CPAWS National Board

The Governance Committee has responsibility for nominating a slate of trustee candidates each year for the CPAWS National Board.  It follows policies which ensure that the Board has a combination of relevant skills, experience at the chapter level, and geographic balance. In most cases, trustees are limited to a maximum of six consecutive years of service.

On March 30th, the Governance Committee issued a call for candidates. The notice was sent to the “CPAWS all” e-mail list and posted on our website.  After considering a number of possible candidates, the Governance Committee recommends the re-election of five existing trustees:

• Julie Davidson (Vice President), Ray Plourde, Stephen Mayor for terms of three years each; and
• Evan Sorestad (Secretary) and David Lang (Treasurer) for terms of two years each, bringing them both up to six of service years since the current term limits were established in 2007.

Brief biographies of these trustees are available on the CPAWS website.

Two existing trustees did not seek re-election due to other commitments.  In their place, the Governance Committee recommends the election of Alex Abboud and André Vallillee for terms of three years each.

Alex Abboud is a current director and former Chair of the Northern Alberta chapter of CPAWS.  His education is in political science education, and his work experience is in policy, governance & communications for public sector organizations and NGOs.

André Vallillee has a BA in Environmental Studies & Political Science from the University of Victoria and a Masters in Planning from UBC.  He also has specialized training in community-based research, project management, and capacity building strategies.  He is currently Program Manager for Province-Wide Environment Grants at the Trillium Foundation, the largest funder of ENGOs in ON.  He was previously Resource Development Manager with United Way Peterborough, Environmental Planner Smart Growth BC, and a researcher with SFU’s Centre for Sustainable Community Development, UBC’s Centre for Human Settlements, and UVIC’s Centre for Co-op & Community-Based Economy.

While the Governance Committee makes every effort to put together the best slate, our by-laws allow any member who feels that the slate falls short of the needs of CPAWS to submit alternative candidates.  Any such nominations should be submitted no later than September 23, 2010 to Éric Hébert-Daly, National Executive Director at eric@cpaws.org.  Nominations must include the name of the nominee, their written consent, address, phone number, email, and brief biography.

Any additional nominations will result in a mail-in election, which can be costly in terms of time and the money donated by members. To ensure that donation money is not used wastefully, CPAWS by-laws require that any additional candidate be supported by the signatures of 25 people who were members of CPAWS at the time of this notice.

Oliver Kent, President