I want to share some practices that your congregation can use to draft and create policies that feel like they're relational and inclusive. So in most congregations, the board approves policies, but the board doesn't have to write the policies. But what the board might want to do is convene a task force or a convergence of different committees to think through what should be in the policy.
I recommend some practices that I learned from Sociocracy or Dynamic Governance. I think that model has a wonderful way of thinking through things in a way that's very inclusive, that gives a lot of opportunity for input, and -- at the end of the day -- gives you something that people can live with.
Step one is to get all the people in the room that you want to have input into the policy. Let's use a safety policy as an example. Now a safety policy is a quite comprehensive policy. You might want to chunk it into different topics within a wider net of safety policy. So let's talk about maybe sanctuary safety, Sunday morning safety, and the things you want to consider. So the first thing you want to do is convene the leaders of areas who would be impacted by this policy, or who have information that might be helpful for that policy. So this might be your worship arts team, your staff, definitely your religious education folks, your membership folks (or your greeters), the folks who kind of want to make it a welcoming space. Perhaps your building and grounds folks. You might even think of some other folks. And what you want to do is get together and do what we call “picture forming.” There'll be a link on this page about that, picture forming.
So what this does is creates a shared understanding of what the challenge is. So for a safety policy, you're going to maybe name some of the dangers you're concerned about that the safety policy would need to address. You would maybe include who would need to sign off on the policy once it gets to the point of approval. You might also come up with some of the research that you might want to do before the policy, you know, look at the UUA Safe Congregation Pages, for example. Perhaps you might want to invite in your local law enforcement to do an assessment of your building for safety, or your fire department, that sort of thing. So the picture forming is really kind of creating the parameters of what your policy will entail. So once you've got that shared understanding of what you're trying to fix with the policy, or what you're trying to address with the policy, then you can start coming up with ideas about what needs to be in the policy in order to , make it a policy that will meet all those needs.
So again, you can -- in this case -- you can do a brainstorming amongst the folks. I recommend the circle process, where everyone gets a chance to share something, somebody captures it, and out of those ideas or concerns you can create a list of things that you want your policy to address.
So at this point it's very efficient to appoint a couple of people to take the picture forming list of things you want to consider, and to take a list of suggestions, and to go off and to craft a policy proposal that meets all of those things. Maybe three people, but really you already have a lot of input, so you don't need a lot of input in the actual crafting. So the team (or the maybe the three people) go off and they craft the policy. Then they bring it back to the same group of people, and they share it. They start out with any clarifying questions about what they've shared. And then people respond to the policy proposal: Does it meet the criteria in the picture forming that we all agreed upon? If it doesn't, then maybe you point out what it needs to address, what it didn't address. They would go back and redraft the proposal and bring it back. You wouldn't want to Wordsmith it in that meeting -- you want to honor people's time.
But if everyone who's there agrees that, yes, this proposal meets all these criteria that were part of our picture forming. Does it include the suggestions? Also to look through that and -- if it checks all those boxes -- then you can do some rounds about how to shape the proposal, maybe refine it a little bit so that everybody can live with it. 
And once it gets to a point where no one has any objections to it  -- and I would absolutely recommend doing a round to make sure every one is good with what's there (it doesn't have to be perfect) -- but everybody can live with the policy. There’ll probably be some tweaks, so the crafting team would take it back and work on those tweaks and bring it back for a final approval of that group. And then it can go to the board for final approval and become a policy.