[Nfbc-info] Board retreat

[Mary Willows]

Congratulations East Bay Chapter.  Let's encourage every chapter to hold 
similar meetings.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena Olsen" <olsen.serena at gmail.com>
To: "nfbc-info" <nfbc-info at nfbnet.org>; "NFB Chapter Presidents discussion 
list" <chapter-presidents at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 8:54 AM
Subject: [Nfbc-info] Board retreat


> Greetings Fellow Californians and Leaders:
>
> The 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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