Most non-profit organizations are serious about the services they provide. Some are also enthusiastic about how well they govern themselves. Nowhere is this more case than with the Flower Cart, a curiously named, but very successful agency in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.
The Flower Cart provides training and vocational support services to adults considered to have an intellectual disability. The organization’s name originates from an actual wooden flower cart that was parked outsider the original building when the organization was founded in 1970.
The Flower Cart has a budget of almost three million dollars, half from government programs and half from earned income from social enterprise activities. Its income generating activities include a wholesale bakery, a wood shop and a food packaging operation. It is well known in Nova Scotia for its success in creating employment partnerships for their clients with companies like the internationally known Michelin Tire and local success story Just Us Coffee Roasters.
The Flower Cart also deserves to be well known for its dedication to being well governed. This commitment is in part reflected by the organization’s ongoing investment in training board members through Dalhousie University’s online Improving Non-Profit Governance program. The photo above depicts the Flower Cart’s board holding the certificate they as a whole earned for the strides they have made in improving their governance practice.
The strength of their approach to governance is reflected in their robust statements about how the board governs the organization and their efforts in measuring and communicating their “social bottom line” impacts. The Flower Cart’s commitment to governance involves work around the board table in and at the organization-community boundary. As part of their strategic planning initiative they have been talking about their stakeholders – who are they and what their interests are, and they have started talking with some of them. Most recently the executive director of the Nova Scotia Association for Community Living, an organization with whom the Flower Cart shares clientele, attended a board meeting. They plan to invite others to their board table over the coming months to deepen their understanding of their community.
Grant MacDonald is an adult educator and consultant living on the east coast of Canada. He has an long standing and enthusiastic interest in non-profit governance and leadership.