Board Spotlight - Sam Gellar-Smith

When Sam Gellar-Smith first offered the Protagonist bookstore as a meeting place for the then Community Center Exploratory Committee, she didn’t realize just what she was getting herself into. Hearing the vision of the center, as a place where community can work together to create something that fits the needs of the entire community, prompted her to offer her services as a board member.

Sam’s experience with the boards of a variety of non-profit organizations provides a valuable array of skills and experiences. From the Humane Society in Charlotte, NC to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Sam has seen non-profit boards in an up close and personal way. In particular, Sam brings policy writing and programming experience to the board. She says,

“Policy is not particularly fun or exciting. You’re trying to make sure all bases are covered. Particularly in government work, because people will find any inch and expand into a mile. So unfortunately, you have to look at the worst possible case scenarios and plan for those. My experience with policy has been to find and close out those little murky corners, how to take gray areas and make them black-and-white in the policy. It’s common with policy to have the board review a policy, then go back to the drawing board over and over again.

The goal of non-profit policy is to keep everyone safe. It’s very close to my heart. I want to keep the Dryden Center for Community as safe as possible and make sure that the policies keep everybody safe, from the executive team all the way to the person who just pops in for one event. I want to keep as much quality in these policies as possible and to make sure that the DCC can continue along without having any legal speed bumps.”

Sam’s dreams for the Center extend well beyond the policy realm. She offers, “We would love to partner, as Protagonist, to do some book festivals, bringing in more authors. I want to see us being this kind of beacon of arts and freedom of expression and the ability to come in and just make beautiful things for our community. If somebody says, ‘Hey, how do I do this?’, we say, ‘Go to the community center. They’re going to have an answer. They’re going to have a resource.’”