SafeSport, governance, and idea-sharing were up for discussion at a recent first-time gathering of the United States Olympic Committee’s national governing body (NGB) presidents, including United States Equestrian Federation President Murray Kessler.

There were three major take-aways identified by Kessler for USEF from the high-level discussion among NGB presidents:

• achieving more consistency in the way NGBs are communicating SafeSport violations,
• increasing the diversity of the board, in terms of board members’ backgrounds, perspectives, disciplines, and skill sets, and
• increasing the percentage of independent board members.

There was also good news for the USEF: an analysis conducted by Deloitte and presented at the summit found that US Equestrian was among the strongest Olympic sport national governing bodies in terms of governance, best practices, funding, and staffing.  “I was proud to see equestrian ranked as a Tier 1 sport,” Kessler said.

The meeting was the first of what is expected to become a regular series of gatherings to share best practices and ideas and to develop efficiencies among the NGBs.

“It was a great meeting,” Kessler said. “The focus is different when they get the NGB CEOs and marketing leaders together to talk about operating plans, execution of the Olympic cycle, and marketing of sponsorships. This meeting was for those responsible for managing each NGB’s board, and it was 100% focused on governance. As part of that, we went through a couple of days of exercises and discussion about the common issues facing the various boards, including how we are handling and communicating SafeSport and how we’re selecting board members, as just a few examples. There were a lot of similarities between the NGBs, but also many differences, which made for great learning and sharing of best practices.”