Our Constitution establishes an Executive Committee, Chairperson, Vice-Chairperson, Secretary, Vice-Secretary, Treasurer, Organizing Secretary and two Committee Members, elected for a three-year term renewable once, as the organ responsible for day-to-day administration between General Assembly meetings. Written into a founding document, that can sound like an abstract governance structure. In practice, it's a group of volunteers each carrying specific, concrete responsibilities, and it's worth explaining what those actually look like.
The roles that keep programmes running week to week
The Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson hold overall responsibility for the organisation's direction and represent Pro-Green Shapers in external partnerships, our NEMA arrangement and county engagement both run substantially through this pair, alongside chairing General Assembly and committee meetings. The Secretary and Vice-Secretary handle the organisation's records and correspondence, from meeting minutes to the kind of donor and partner reporting we've described in a separate post, work that's easy to overlook from the outside but that keeps the organisation's institutional memory intact as membership and volunteer involvement naturally turns over.
The Treasurer manages funds under the multiple-signatory requirement our Constitution sets out, and has taken on a considerably larger role over the past year as our funding sources have diversified into corporate partnerships and grants requiring the kind of source-specific tracking we now maintain. The Organizing Secretary coordinates the logistics behind planting days, clean-ups and training sessions, site bookings, equipment, volunteer scheduling, the unglamorous but essential work that determines whether a planned activity actually runs smoothly on the day.
Sub-committees extend the Executive Committee's reach
Our Constitution allows the Executive Committee to establish sub-committees for specific functions, and several now exist covering tree planting, clean-ups and fundraising, each drawing on committee members alongside experienced volunteers from outside the Executive Committee itself. This structure matters practically: it means specific programme decisions, like the site survey priorities for an upcoming planting season, can be made by the people closest to that work rather than requiring the full Executive Committee to weigh in on every operational detail.
The youth nursery team and green livelihoods track, while not formal sub-committees under the Constitution, operate with a similar degree of delegated responsibility in practice, a reflection of how much trust and operational independence has been extended to volunteers who've demonstrated consistency over time, echoing the same pattern we described in our recent look at individual youth livelihoods stories.
Elections and accountability
Executive Committee members are elected by the General Assembly, the full registered membership, at the appropriate meeting, for a three-year term renewable once, a structure meant to balance continuity, since institutional knowledge takes time to build, with genuine accountability to the wider membership rather than indefinite, unelected tenure. Financial accounts and a full activity report are presented to the General Assembly at each Annual General Meeting, the same accountability structure that underpins the annual reporting we've described in our own look back at 2025.
This isn't purely procedural. Members have raised genuine questions and pushed back on specific decisions at past General Assembly meetings, on one occasion prompting a reconsideration of how a particular clean-up site was prioritised relative to others on the roster, which is exactly the kind of accountability the structure is meant to enable.
Why we're explaining this now
As Pro-Green Shapers has grown, from a handful of founding members to an organisation running multiple concurrent programmes, questions about who's actually responsible for what have become more common, from partners, from new volunteers, and from residents engaging with us for the first time through a clean-up or planting day. We think a clearer public account of how the Executive Committee actually functions, beyond the bare structure set out in our Constitution, is a reasonable thing to offer anyone considering getting more involved, whether as a volunteer, a partner, or a future committee member themselves.
How someone joins the Executive Committee
Committee membership isn't reserved for founding members or a fixed inner circle, every seat is filled through election by the General Assembly, and any registered member in good standing is eligible to stand when a seat comes open at the end of a term. In practice, most members who've stood for election have already built a track record through sustained involvement in a specific programme, the nursery, a clean-up sub-committee, our education work, which gives the wider membership a concrete basis for evaluating a candidate's suitability for a particular role beyond general goodwill.
We'd encourage any member who's been consistently involved and is interested in taking on a more formal governance role to consider standing when a seat next becomes available, and to speak with a current committee member beforehand about what a specific role actually involves day to day, the accounts in this post are a starting point, but the honest texture of a role, its time demands, its satisfactions and its frustrations, comes across better in a direct conversation than in a general description.