27 February, 2020

We’re only 2 months into 2020 and so much has happened for our Archery NZ Board. Firstly, a huge thank you to both Robyn and Colin for the valuable contribution they have made to Archery NZ over the years. Now is the time for the Board to take their work and continue the journey for Archery NZ.

Towards the end of 2019, the Board created a new strategy to support our direction over the next few years. We shared this strategy with some of you at the February 2020 AGM and will make this available for you via our website in the coming weeks.

Following the AGM, the Board met to agree on new Board members together with the appointment of a new Chair: Elizabeth, and Deputy Chair: Lexie. Since then, we have all been working really hard to determine how best to support our new strategy. More importantly, we have been focusing on how the Board can best demonstrate the value that Archery NZ can provide its existing and potential new members. We’ll give you a flavour of this now and also work through how we can demonstrate this through regular communication with you going forward.

Acknowledging the need to move at a fast pace to support our strategy, we have introduced a number of Board Sub-Committees over the past few weeks.

The High Performance Sub-Committee, under the direction of Lexie and Lisa, will seek to review policies around selection, high-performance, development and coaching.

The Youth & Junior Sub-Committee, under the direction of Tracy, will look to focus on promotion & growth of existing and future activities for our young people through both schools and club.

Towards the end of 2019, the Board introduced a Finance, Audit and Risk (FAR) Sub-Committee, supported by Elizabeth, Chris and Lexie, and a Governance Sub-Committee, supported by Elizabeth, Lexie and Sier. The FAR Sub-Committee was a giant leap for Archery NZ, testing a more agile Sub-Committee approach. It’s remit is key for Archery NZ as it allows us to demonstrate to you and also those we seek funding from that we have strong financial, audit and risk management activities in place. It’s working well and we will continue to look at opportunities to make it work even better.

The Governance Sub-Committee is currently working on identifying enhancements to our Constitution and Selection Policy. We have identified these as being important themes to review to ensure that we are appropriately serving your needs whilst supporting areas such as the financial sustainability of Archery NZ. Our work will also help us to ensure that we are creating and maintaining a transparent, clear and robust set of policies, standards and procedures across the work of Archery NZ.

Supporting transparency and a robust governance process, the Sub-Committees are directly accountable to the Board, who will maintain responsibilities for making decisions based upon their recommendations. We are already seeing the positive results of this approach, through faster output being generated by people who have the right subject matter expert input on the activities. Right now, these Sub-Committees are comprised of Board members only, but we will start to reach out to others for input and support at the right time.

We acknowledge that there are other needs to support our strategy and we want to give you confidence that we are working on these also. For example, we are currently reviewing needs around areas such as communication and our digital channels, event management, coaching and training. Some of these may be best served through the introduction of additional or the inclusion in existing Sub-Committee work.

On a sad note, our General Manager, Phil is moving on. Phil has been with us for about half a year and has made such a positive impact for Archery NZ. Phil moves on to an incredible opportunity and, while sad to see him go, we are so happy for him.

Looking to Archery NZ, we have identified another equally incredible person to support us through the GM role. We will give you an update on this very soon. We’ll also look to tell you a little more about each of us - although some of you may well be very familiar with some of our Board members!

The Board are looking forward to working for you in 2020 and beyond and welcome your input and thoughts on how we can best serve the members of Archery NZ.

Elizabeth, Lexie, Sier, Tracy, Chris & Lisa

https://www.archerynz.co.nz/about-archery-nz/executive/