Board and committee roles, and who actually does what

Every small organisation I've ever come across has a version of the same conversation. Something didn't happen - the grant application slid past its deadline, nobody renewed the insurance, a batch of new volunteers turned up on a Saturday and there was no one there to greet them - and afterwards, in a slightly tense meeting, someone says it out loud: "I thought you were doing that." The honest answer is almost always that nobody was, because it was never really anybody's job. It sat in the gap between everyone's roles, and gaps like that are where small organisations quietly come undone.

Clear roles are the fix, and they're less about hierarchy than about closing that gap. When people know what they're responsible for - and, just as importantly, what they're not - the "someone should have done that" moments get rare, because there's a someone attached to each thing. That's the entire point of writing roles down. Not to build an org chart that makes a five-person committee look like a bank, but so that nothing important is left with nobody's name on it.

Let me carry one example through so this doesn't stay abstract. Say you help run Yayasan Tunas Ilmu - a small community foundation in a kampung on the edge of Yogyakarta that runs a free neighbourhood library and learning centre. Two rooms lined with 2,000 - 3,000 donated books, weekend read-aloud sessions for 40 - 60 kids, free after-school tutoring, the occasional adult skills class. Six people on the pengurus (the committee that runs it), somewhere between 20 and 30 volunteers who come and go, and a budget that lives on donations and the odd small grant. No paid staff. It's the kind of outfit where everyone does a bit of everything, which is exactly why getting the roles right matters more here, not less.

What the board is actually for

The most common mistake I see with small committees is that the board treats itself as a doing body rather than a watching one. Everyone rolls up their sleeves, which is lovely and necessary when you're tiny, but it means nobody is actually holding the wider view - is the money holding up, are we still doing what we said we'd do, is any one person carrying too much before they burn out. That watching job is what a board is genuinely for. Oversight, not doing everything. The board makes sure things happen; it doesn't have to personally do them all, and the moment it forgets that distinction it stops being able to see the organisation clearly, because it's got its head down inside the work like everyone else.

If you're a registered yayasan in Indonesia this is partly decided for you, and it's worth understanding because the law is quietly sensible about it. A yayasan has three organs: the Pembina (the founders and trustees who set direction, approve the big decisions and appoint the others), the Pengurus (the executive committee - ketua, sekretaris, bendahara - who actually run the thing day to day), and the Pengawas (a supervisor whose job is to check the money and keep the Pengurus honest). You don't have to love the paperwork to see the wisdom: the people running it aren't the same people checking it, and someone above the day-to-day is holding the direction. Even if you're not a registered yayasan - just an informal community group - those same three functions exist whether you've named them or not. Someone sets direction, someone runs it, someone ought to be checking the books. Name them, and half the governance problem is already solved.

The three roles you can't skip

Whatever you call yourselves, there are three jobs that have to exist from day one, and they map onto what most groups already do instinctively. Get these three genuinely covered - not just named on paper - and you've got the spine of a functioning committee.

The chair, or ketua

The chair's job is not to be the boss, and the good ones know it. It's to make sure the group actually decides things and then does them. In practice that means running meetings so they end with clear decisions rather than a warm feeling and no follow-up, keeping an eye on the whole picture so nothing falls through, and being the person others can go to when they're stuck. At Tunas Ilmu the ketua is the one who notices that the tutoring roster has three empty Saturdays coming up and makes sure someone owns fixing it - not necessarily by fixing it herself, but by making sure it doesn't just sit there unmentioned until a room full of kids turns up to no tutor. A chair who tries to personally do everything is, oddly, a weak chair, because they've made themselves the bottleneck and stopped the rest of the committee from carrying real responsibility.

The secretary, or sekretaris

The secretary is the organisation's memory, and it's the role most often underrated by people who haven't had to live without one. They keep the records - what was decided, when the meetings are, who's on the committee, where the important documents live - and they handle the communication that keeps everyone pointing the same way. It's unglamorous and it's the difference between an organisation that knows what it agreed six months ago and one that keeps relitigating the same decisions because nobody wrote them down. For a small group the secretary role quietly bleeds into everything: the agenda, the minutes, the volunteer contact list, the shared drive that isn't a total shambles. If you can only properly resource one of the three supporting roles well, in my experience this is the one that pays back fastest.

The treasurer, or bendahara

The treasurer looks after the money, and for a donation-funded outfit like a rumah baca that job is more about trust than arithmetic. They track what comes in and what goes out, make sure the group can pay for what it commits to, and - this is the part people forget - they make the finances visible to everyone else so it never becomes a black box that only one person understands. That last bit matters enormously for a community foundation, because the fastest way to lose a community's trust is for the money to feel opaque. A treasurer who can put a simple, honest one-page summary in front of the committee each month is worth far more than a fancy accounting system nobody else can read. And please, whatever else you do, don't let the same person both hold the money and be the only one who checks it - that's not a comment on anyone's honesty, it's just basic protection for them as much as for you.

The common extras - add them when you actually need them

Beyond the core three, most groups eventually grow a few more defined roles, and the trap here is inventing them too early to make the committee look substantial. Don't. Add a role when there's genuinely enough of that work to justify one person owning it, and not a moment before, or you'll end up with impressive-sounding titles attached to jobs nobody's actually doing. The ones that tend to earn their place:

• A volunteer or membership coordinator. For Tunas Ilmu, with 20 - 30 volunteers cycling through, this is probably the first extra role worth creating - someone who welcomes new volunteers, keeps the roster, and makes sure people don't just drift off because nobody noticed they'd stopped coming. It's a real job the moment you've got more than a handful of helpers, and it's closely tied to keeping the whole thing alive. I've written separately about managing volunteers well, because it deserves more than a bullet point.
• An events or programmes person. Someone who owns the actual activities - the weekend sessions, the occasional book drive, the adult classes - so they're planned rather than scrambled together the night before. For a library this is close to the heart of what you exist to do, so it's often worth pulling out of the ketua's lap fairly early.
• A communications person. The one who keeps the WhatsApp group, the Instagram, the donor updates ticking over so the community actually knows you exist and can see where their donations went. Easy to treat as an afterthought, and then you wonder why donations dried up and nobody came to the open day.

Notice these are functions before they're titles. A group of six can cover all of them between four or five people, and a group of sixty might have a small team behind each. The question is never "what titles should we have" - it's "what work genuinely needs a clear owner", and you answer it by looking at what keeps falling through the gaps.

The reality: a few people wearing many hats

Here's the bit the tidy governance guides tend to skip. In an organisation like Tunas Ilmu, one person is very often the sekretaris and the comms person and the one who unlocks the door on Saturdays, and that's not a failure of structure - it's just what small looks like. Trying to pretend otherwise, and drawing up a role for every function as though you had thirty people to fill them, mostly produces a document that bears no relation to who does what in real life. So be honest about the hats. Write down who is actually wearing each one, even when it's the same head wearing three, because the value of clear roles doesn't come from having lots of them - it comes from everyone knowing, without asking, who owns a given thing.

What you're really guarding against is the two failure modes that quietly kill small groups. The first is the gap - the job with nobody's name on it, the "I thought you were doing that". The second, and it's the more common killer, is the opposite: one heroic person doing everything, holding the whole organisation together through sheer effort, until they get tired or busy or move house, and the whole thing folds because it was never really an organisation, it was them. Both problems are solved by the same thing - roles that are written down and genuinely shared - which is why this unglamorous bit of admin matters so much more than it looks.

Guarding against burnout and the one-person organisation

If everything depends on one person, you don't have a resilient organisation, you have a very dedicated volunteer and a countdown. The dedicated volunteer is usually the ketua or the founder, and they rarely see it coming, because doing more feels like commitment rather than a warning sign. The job of a healthy board is partly to protect that person from themselves - to notice when too much is pooling on one desk and to move some of it, on purpose, before the person breaks rather than after. It's uncomfortable, because the over-carrying person is usually the most capable one and it feels almost rude to take work off them. Do it anyway. An organisation that can only run while its best person runs flat out isn't sustainable, however impressive it looks this year.

The test I'd apply: if any one person on your committee vanished for three months - illness, a new baby, a job in another city - would the organisation cope, or quietly stall? If the honest answer is "stall", you've found the person carrying too much, and that's a structure problem to fix now, not a loyalty to admire.

The practical defence is spreading the knowledge, not just the tasks. The two-signature rule on money, a shared drive the sekretaris doesn't solely control, a volunteer list more than one person can see - these all mean the organisation knows things rather than a single person knowing them. It's slower in the short run and it's the difference between a group that survives its founder stepping back and one that doesn't.

Term limits and succession - the boring stuff that saves you

Nobody wants to talk about who takes over, partly because in a small friendly group it feels a bit cold and formal, and partly because the current people are doing fine and it seems premature. It isn't. The single most fragile point in a small organisation is the handover, and the ones that survive across a decade are almost always the ones that planned for people leaving before anyone actually left. You don't need anything elaborate. A rough sense that the ketua serves two or three years and then hands on, that nobody is expected to do a role forever, and that whenever someone takes a role they bring one other person close enough to it that they could step in - that's most of it.

Term limits sound corporate for a kampung library, and you can absolutely keep them informal - this isn't about rigid rules, it's about the gentle expectation that roles rotate and people get a rest. A ketua who's been in the chair for eight years is often a warning sign, not a triumph, because it usually means nobody else was ever brought forward, and when that person finally stops there's a cliff rather than a handover. Where all this lives, ideally, is in your organisation's governing document - the anggaran dasar, the AD/ART, or whatever you call your rules - so it's written once and not re-argued every year. I've put together a bylaws template that covers roles, terms and how decisions get made, which is the natural home for the structure this article is really about.

Where to actually start

If this feels like a lot, it isn't, and you don't do it all at once. Start with the three that can't be skipped, make sure a real named person owns the chair, the records and the money, and that the money person isn't the only money-checker. Then look honestly at what keeps falling into the gap and pull out one more role at a time to cover it - probably the volunteer coordinator first if you're anything like Tunas Ilmu. Write down who wears which hats, even the shared ones, and once a year ask the vanishing-for-three-months question about each person and rebalance before you have to….

A fair bit of the day-to-day this describes - keeping the volunteer and supporter list in one place everyone can see, tracking who's involved and who's drifted, giving the sekretaris and the coordinator a shared home for the records instead of a folder on one person's laptop - is the sort of thing Anggota is built to take off your plate, so the knowledge lives in the organisation rather than in someone's head. If that sounds useful you're welcome to try it for free and see how it fits. And if you'd rather take these ideas and run them through a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group you already have, that's genuinely fine too - the roles, the shared knowledge and the succession planning matter far more than the tool you keep them in, and a committee where everyone knows who owns what is worth building however you get there.