Hi Cascadians,
I had a conversation about our draft annual plan with Alex this afternoon.
Alex believes that at this point in our development, our priority should be
expanding the number and the capacity of our volunteers, and that we are
too early in our development for the temporary / part-time paid positions
that we proposed in our budget. This means that our goals to develop
institutional partnerships and to do outreach work must be significantly
reduced in proportion to the capacity of our volunteer network. We know
that we have many opportunities for partnerships and public engagement in
the Cascadia region, and hopefully we will still be able to pursue those
partnerships and engagement opportunities at a low intensity level that our
volunteers can support in a sustainable way. Again, Alex believes that our
first goal should be to expand our volunteer network.
We will need to reorient our plans and our budget to focus on development
and support of our volunteer network. I will work on redrafting the goals,
calendar, plan and budget over the course of the next week, and have a
conversation with Alex about the possible revisions next week. I have also
asked Alex to create a learning pattern that describes the development path
of organizations such as ours; I think that such a learning pattern would
have been very helpful to us when we were first discussing our goals for
this year. After the conversations with Alex have finished, I plan to
re-engage with our Board to discuss the goals and funding that Alex and WMF
feel that they are willing to support.
I am cc'ing this email to Alex and hope that she will add any comments or
clarifications that she has. It would probably be best to direct any
questions or comments from Cascadians directly to Alex, preferably on this
list so that others can benefit from the discussion.
Thanks,
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.*
*—Catherine Munro*