Set a deadline for the meeting or the committee for receiving potential matters for the agenda. This is up to you and your home/work circumstances but probably three or four days before the meeting gives you enough time to prepare. You will need longer for major meetings, up to two weeks. For some trustees meetings two weeks is a legal requirement. Bear in mind that Quakers in Britain do not use any-other-business (AOB), the common catch-all for last-minute matters in non-Quaker meetings. Why? Because preparation is crucial for the QBM approach the clerk should never be bounced into taking an item at the meeting itself if it can be avoided. Clerks who out of kindness agree to take items without warning in the meeting often seem to get into trouble because there may be a lack of necessary facts, or Friends are presenting ambiguous or irrelevant material. So that implies there will be no catch-all miscellaneous category – your preparation work helps to eliminate that.
