Yesterday was Day 1 of our staff planning retreat. Despite uncertainties about what the coming year will hold, particularly for the NEH budget, we all shared a great deal of excitement about moving forward.
We ended last year with so many reasons to celebrate - our largest fundraising event to date last October, a move to a beautiful, newly-renovated space, receiving an important capacity-building grant that will increase our ability to serve our constituents, and a great, talented, passionate team in place. This spring, we will bring on a new class of board members and begin work on board development and capacity-building.
We started our meeting with a fairly open-ended discussion of what our particular strengths are at this moment, and how we'd like to leverage these in the new year. One of the refrains of the morning was the need to create the appropriate and necessary space for reflection, documentation, and rigorously and regularly interpreting our own learning. As an organization whose mission embraces learning, reflection, and interpretation, we all believe that this is critical and valuable. But in the onslaught of day-to-day tasks for a small staff, how do we prioritize this? What does this look like?
For starters, I think it looks like more time for meaningful conversations - internally with staff, and externally, in our community. We discussed the possibility of a series of discussions with grantees and other stakeholders about how our organizations are assessing their own work, what we can learn from what we've already done, what we can learn from other types of organizations. We want to continue to build trust and transparency about what we do and how we do it.
This afternoon, we move to Day 2 and specific goal-setting. (There may be Gantt charts.) And I expect we'll be announcing some open-house type meetings for the coming months. Perhaps you can join us.
