Continuing to Build
Updates from the College Football Players Association
This is a free online newsletter for Jason Stahl, Executive Director of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA). If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter, you can do so by clicking the subscribe button above. If you’d like to financially support our efforts at the CFBPA you can do that here. If you are a past, present or future college football player, I ask that you consider becoming a member of the CFBPA.
In my last newsletter updating the progress of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA), I discussed our new leadership structure. As I explained in that update, we have developed two new leadership pillars to ensure that the CFBPA is sustainable long term and fulfills its mission of being of, by and for all past, present and future college football players. The first pillar is our Board of Directors and the second is our members-only Leadership Committee. Since posting that newsletter, our Board of Directors has met once and our Leadership Committee has met three times. So, I thought it was now appropriate to give some updates as to what we’ve been up to. Up until this point, we’ve been focused on three key areas: the creation of our bylaws; articulating our mission, values and vision with clarity; and launching our coming Summer Membership Drive. Here’s some updates on all of these:
1) Creation of the CFBPA Bylaws. Any good membership-driven players association needs to have strong institutional bylaws which are publicly accessible; easily understood; give the membership real power over the organization; and which create sustainable institutional underpinnings for the long haul. Within our Board of Directors and Leadership Committee meetings, we are attempting to write bylaws which hold to these ideals.
Our CFBPA bylaws need to make sure that our membership—college football players of the past, present and future—have real voting rights over the direction of the organization and over its leadership structure. Simply put, our bylaws need to ensure that our leadership is accountable to the membership. We are ensuring this is the case in two ways—through term limits and future direct election of CFBPA leadership by the members.
As to term limits, my position of Executive Director will have a term limit of five years with a cap of two terms served by any one person. The other positions on our Board of Directors will have a term limit of 3 years with a cap of two terms served by any one person. After the current Board of Directors terms there will be an elections process for all Board positions and these positions will be directly elected by CFBPA membership. Additionally, as we grow our membership in size, we will be determining how members of the Leadership Committee and future members-only leadership structure will be elected and how long they will serve.
Although term limits and member-control of the leadership structure can be more laborious than a top-down leadership structure, we are writing these bylaws in order to show our members that we intend to fully fulfill our mission of being a player’s association of, by and for the players. The CFBPA is not about advancing the interests of a single individual but about advancing the will of the collective. We believe this is particularly important given that we are operating as a nonprofit institution.
2) Refining the CFBPA Mission, Values and Vision. Particularly in our Leadership Committee meetings, we have been refining our mission, values and vision to reflect what our members want for the future of the CFBPA. After much debate and discussion, the final drafts of the three of these are now online. Take a look at all three at this link. Our mission and values now reflect the will of our members much more so than they previously did. Additionally, they show that one of our keys demands as an institution heading forward will be gaining seats at the table for all high-level decision making in college football.
How we seek to make this a reality is contained in our updated vision which I urge you to read in full at this link. The vision contains a timeline for our development and for how we intend to gain our seats at the tables of power. Additionally, our vision document contains many other activities we intend to engage in over the next several years including the work of our forthcoming research and legal departments.
3) The Summer Membership Drive. Finally, another main topic of conversation at our leadership meetings has been our forthcoming Summer Membership Drive. As we gear up for and plan this two-month event, I don’t want to say too much about it. However, here is what I can say at this point. The Summer Membership Drive is the first time that the past, present and future players of college football show that the CFBPA is their player’s association. Along these lines, and at the outset of the Summer Membership Drive, we will announce the members of our Leadership Committee. We will use this drive to attempt to grow our membership through the summer when players actually have some time to hear what we’re all about. By the start of the college football season in 2022 we hope to have achieved our goal of becoming the unquestioned nationwide collective voice of all college football players past, present and future.