Unitarian Universalist congregations like to change our elected leadership a lot. Many congregations change their board president every year. Many others have congregational boards that completely turn over every two to three years. And while I wonder at the wisdom of this, I think one of the reasons we do this is because these roles can seem so difficult and demanding. And one of the reasons this is often true is because we do not do a good job at building good policy bases for our congregations. The third congregational board practice is policy development. And it arises as a necessity for a congregational board in order to live their fiduciary responsibility, you know, to ensure that all the assets and resources of the congregation are used towards the fulfillment of the congregation's vision and mission. Think of policy in a congregation as a way to capture institutional wisdom. With as often as our congregations change elected leadership, we need a way to capture and share with future boards, the good work and decisions of previous boards. And policy is the way we do that. When we make decisions, and do good congregational discernment, that does not result in creating policy, then the good work that the previous boards did is lost in history. And new boards end up having to do the same work and discernment over and over and over again. The two keys to good policy development is, one, to have a good centralized system and location and structure for the storage of policy. And the second is that of a practice of reviewing policy on a regular basis as a congregational board. One of the things I asked congregations to do is to send me all of their policy before I begin to work with them. And it is a telling sign when every policy is in a different format. Or that they have to go back to all the past presidents and ask them to pull the policies from their tenure off of their personal computers in order to collect them to send them to me. Pick a format for policy and stick to it. Pick a centralized location, like a policy book on a shared cloud drive to keep all that policy in one place. When you're thinking about congregational policies, it is best to think of them in three different categories. Often consultants like me, will use the metaphor of nested mixing bowls, or the bowls that sit within each other to take up less space. The next mixing bowl in, sitting within your foundational documents is your governing policies, or the policies that define how the board functions, how the board relates to the congregational executive, and how the board relates to the other parts of your congregation. To develop good policy the board has to keep at the center what is the vision, vision and mission of the congregation. For the purpose of policy is to make it possible for the congregation to bring that vision into being by fulfilling the congregation's mission. When the Board is considering a policy, the central question is how well the policy supports the congregation's vision and mission, and fulfills the board's fiduciary responsibility to use all of the assets and resources of the Congregation for the fulfillment of that congregational vision and mission. But to do good policy, the board also needs the fourth practice of congregational boards and that is having a good assessment of what is happening in the congregation