Community Association Fundamentals | FOAM
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Community Association Fundamentals | FOAM
The Seat You Didn't Train For
by
The board book the prior board didn't have. Sixteen plain-spoken chapters on fiduciary duty, money, meetings, fair housing, and saying no — with scripts and frameworks for the volunteer director who has to act like an expert by Tuesday night.
You ran for the board to fix one thing — the pool, the budget, the front gate — and discovered you'd signed up to help run a multi-million-dollar corporation in your spare time, with no training and a binder nobody updated.
This is the book the prior board didn't have. Sixteen short, plain-spoken chapters walk a volunteer director through the seat: where your authority actually comes from, the legal shield that protects you (and the ways you lose it), how to survive a Tuesday-night meeting, what the treasurer's report is really telling you, how to say no to a neighbor without making an enemy, when fair housing turns an ordinary complaint into a federal one, and which rules you simply can't enforce anymore. It ends where service should — leaving the community better than you found it.
Inside: scripts for the hard conversations, decision frameworks, governance checklists, and worked examples from Texas, Florida, California, Arizona, and North Carolina. Written for the volunteer who never asked to become an expert but has to act like one by Tuesday.
Fundamentals of Association Management, Volunteer Board Member Edition — Book 2 of the FOAM series.
Training for the people who run America's neighborhoods.
More than 75 million Americans live in a community association. Almost nobody was trained to run one. Community Association Fundamentals is the bookstore for the people who do it anyway — the volunteer director who became a corporate officer by a show of hands, and the early-career manager learning the job one Tuesday night at a time. The Fundamentals of Association Management (FOAM) series covers governance, money, risk, meetings, vendors, fair housing, and the rules your legislature quietly took off your books — in plain English, with the checklists, scripts, and worked examples you'll actually use at the table. No academic theory. No jargon. Just the job, told straight — with the occasional casserole. Author bio: Ian Knight, MBA, CMCA®, AMS®, PCAM®, has spent a decade-plus inside community associations — master-planned communities, condominiums, HOAs, townhomes, and every flavor of mixed-use in between — running governance, budgets, vendors, and the occasional 3 a.m. emergency involving a roof. He holds the industry's full alphabet (the letters are real; he sat the exams), and he wrote the FOAM series because the people doing this work deserved better than a statute book and a pep talk. He believes most $40,000 mistakes are preventable, most board fights are process problems wearing people costumes, and nobody should have to learn fiduciary duty from a lawsuit. He writes from the field, not the podium.