Board Meeting and Governance Checklist

Before the meeting: confirm who can vote

• Confirm the quorum number set in your constitution or bylaws.
• List who is serving on the meeting date, excluding members whose terms have ended.
• Mark staff, advisers and other non-voting attendees separately.
• Check the term expiries already on the calendar.

Quorum: the minimum number of eligible members who must be present for a meeting to make valid decisions.

At the meeting: record attendance and quorum

• Record who attended against who was serving.
• Record the quorum rule in force on that date.
• Mark a meeting that fell short of quorum as inquorate.
• Flag every decision minuted at an inquorate meeting until the board addresses it.
• Keep attendance in a form someone can check later.

Conflicts and assurance checks

• Collect a conflict-of-interest declaration from every serving member.
• Track each assurance check as pass or fail.
• Keep pass-or-fail checks out of any overall health score.
• Count skills coverage today and again after scheduled term expiries.
• Name any gap in finance or safeguarding experience before it opens.

Risk register review

• Score each risk's likelihood and impact before controls.
• Lower a residual score only for controls that exist, have an owner and were reviewed.
• Give every open risk an action with an owner and a date.
• Log incidents separately and link each to the risk that anticipated it.
• Present risk scores as a ranking for discussion, not as probabilities.

Inherent risk is exposure before controls. Residual risk is what remains with the controls actually operating.

Program and M&E review

• Hold a weekly exception review of critical, overdue, blocked, due-soon and unupdated items.
• Give each exception a rank, an owner and a written reason.
• Show projects with no plan data as not assessed, not 0% complete.
• Show missing indicator values as not assessed and go get the data.
• Judge each indicator by its own direction, such as lower is better.
• Label each claim as output, outcome, contribution or attribution, based on the evidence held.

Attribution needs a design with a comparison group. Without one, report observed outcomes and say so plainly.