[Nfbc-info] Board retreat

Sun Jan 23 17:48:49 UTC 2011

Serena,

What a great start to 2011.  Good job.

To Your Success,

Mike Hingson

The Michael Hingson Group, INC.
 “Speaking with Vision”
Michael Hingson, President
(415) 827-4084
info at michaelhingson.com
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availability please visit www.michaelhingson.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: nfbc-info-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbc-info-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Serena Olsen
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 8:55 AM
To: nfbc-info; NFB Chapter Presidents discussion list
Subject: [Nfbc-info] Board retreat

Greetings Fellow Californians and Leaders:

1The East Bay chapter of the NFBC (est. May 2010) is happy to report that we
have started 2011 with a very successful board retreat, held yesterday in my
home.  All of our board members were present.  Each of us pitched in to
bring food items for the days meals and snacking.

We started the day at 10 a.m. with brunch and spent the rest of the morning
with Dr. Jernigan's _Blindness: Handicap or Characteristic?_, played an
informative and fun NFB trivia game with a $5 Starbucks gift card going to
our president, Jason Holloway, for answering the most questions correctly,
and closing the morning with a Seth Godin video about leadership and
spreading ideas (he comes from the marketing world and is sort of a hipper,
more progressive answer to Zig Ziggler--I recommend searching for him on You
Tube and watching a few of the many short videos there).

We had a late lunch around 3 (scheduled for 2, but didn't get it in the oven
to warm soon enough--a logistics lesson) and in the afternoon, we got more
focused on the brass tacks of running our chapter for the coming year.  We
listened to Diane Starin's piece on organizing a new chapter (Braille
Monitor 3/1991) and Barbara Pierce's _Open Letter to New Chapter Presidents_
(Braille Monitor 5/99).  In the discussion that folowed, we reflected on our
accomplishments and strengths in our short but powerful history and listed
some of the things we could improve upon.  We agreed that the basics,
membership and fundraising, are our two priorities and should underlie
everything we do.  We subsequently set two goals: 1) to double the number of
dues-paying members from 10 to 20 by this time next year, and 2) to raise
$500 to send an East Bay chapter member to Dallas in 2012.  In addition, we
agreed to start with a 2-month lead time for event planning, since, despite
the variety of great things we _have_ done, we have also had several false
starts on projects that didn't launch due to inadequate lead time/planning.

Next, on 3 by 5 cards and small pieces of paper, we all wrote down ideas for
events and activities that we thought would be good for April 2011 to March
2012 and organized them by month on a large blank stretch of wall in the
hallway.  As we each taped our ideas to the wall, we were able to read
other's ideas and once they were all up, we went through, month by month,
and agreed on a tenative event schedule for the next year, with the
understanding that October to December will be action-packed (and we will be
preparing for it from at least
August) and the summer may be a little slower or different than usual with
people out of town on vacation or going to national convention.

The agenda was set for us to stop there for dinner and something fun like
games or a movie, but brunch and lunch were heavier than I anticipated and
no one was hungry (I anticipated an easy dinner, like ordering pizza) and we
were about an hour behind schedule at that point, so, with everyone eager to
go home and not miss connecting busses, we called it a day.

We focus so much on fundraising, that it can be easy to lose sight of or
take for granted the time and energy that we need to give to the Federation
to make all this work--I can not express deeply enough my gratitude to my
fellow board members for 100% attendance and whole-hearted, enthusiastic
participation, when we all could have been doing any number of other things,
particularly with the glorious California winter weather we've been having
the past few days.  The investment they made in our chapter yesterday will
make the coming year even more powerful and dynamic than our first 8 humble
months as a chapter and I see an extremely vibrant future for the blind of
the East Bay!

Warm regards,

--
Serena Olsen, MAIPS
http://www.linkedin.com/in/serenaolsen

Please support my run in the Team LightHouse Half-Marathon--your
contribution will empower blind youth with the skills and confidence they
need to succeed!!  THANKS!
http://active.com/donate/teamlighthouse/SerenaOlsen

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