Committee Chair Refuses To Call A Meeting

[Guest Phyl]

If a chair calls a committee meeting & two or three of the members just decide they don’t want to attend, & discuss between themselves where they would rather meet & just email & say the meeting is at (a different place). Is this correct? The chair was not unwilling to set a meeting, some of the volunteer members just decided where they wanted to meet & sent out an email with a different location.

[Josh Martin]

13 minutes ago, Guest Phyl said:

If a chair calls a committee meeting & two or three of the members just decide they don’t want to attend, & discuss between themselves where they would rather meet & just email & say the meeting is at (a different place). Is this correct? The chair was not unwilling to set a meeting, some of the volunteer members just decided where they wanted to meet & sent out an email with a different location.

Unless the organization's rules provide otherwise, a committee meeting may only be called by one of these methods: 1) by the committee itself, by majority vote, at a committee meeting, 2) by the chair, 3) by any two members of the committee, if the chair fails to call a meeting of the committee.

Therefore, based upon the facts provided, the action taken by the committee members appears not to be proper. The meeting called by the chair is properly called, and the meeting called by two or three of the members is not properly called. If the two or three members of the committee constitute a significant portion of the committee, however, it may well be necessary as a practical matter for the chair to work with the committee members on this issue. After all, the committee will need a quorum in order to conduct any business.

For future reference, I would note that we generally recommend posting a new question as a new topic on this forum, even if there is an existing topic on a similar issue.

Edited August 20, 2021 at 01:20 AM by Josh Martin