Summer Meetings: An Organization Development Update

My head is still spinning from a few weeks of meeting! The wonderful rush of our loving partners of the Global Collaborative gracing our Santa Cruz home. The sweet and productive 4 day program committee meeting fulfilling the promise of the Community Summit of 2007, bringing together the stakeholders in setting YES!’s programmatic priorities.  A full day board meeting with 2 newly energized members adding new threads to the rich tapestry of our collaboration. Framing, energizing, bringing love and spirit into the conversation and holding space and awareness to allow everyone in, including myself, has left me fulfilled, exhausted and ready to immerse myself in our next chapter.

During these meetings, we continue to wrestle with questions of priorities, capacity and developing an emerging structure that supports our individual desires to thrive in synergy with YES!’s mission, needs and responsibilities. Furthermore we have been taking stock of the various systemic patterns of economic, environmental and political systems breaking down and reframing our understanding of YES!’s role in our changing times. The notion of building communities and creating healing spaces were lifted up and emerged as key themes of our conversations.

In the strategic planning session of our program committee meeting, we had a wonderful conversation dancing with, into and around the definitions and language choices of YES!’s core strategies. Do we “convene," “collaborate,” and “communicate” or “connect” -- or both? How does our commitment to inner, interpersonal and systemic change get lifted up? Do our definitions of our program areas make sense for what we do, with whom and where? In an exercise meant to synthesize the current 2 modes of defining our program areas we left with an additional three.  While there is beauty in our diversity of perspectives, we are still left with the synthesizing work to clarify the way we frame our work. In addition, we were able to set some specific programmatic goals for next year, wrestled with changing our mission statement to include the addition of a suite of programs that are multi generational, not just “young” (while affirming our commitment to engaging young leaders as a central part of our mission), and also touched on some core operational and programmatic principles. We were clear that this would all feed into our strategic planning process to be revitalized at the upcoming board meeting.

Over the next few months, we will unpack the learnings from these meetings, build on the deepening relationships with our partners and each other and reengage with our strategic planning process to help us align our mission, intention and actions in the service of the transformation to thriving just sustainable ways of life.