Dear Friends,
Since January is right around the corner, I want to send out a reminder for our next General Meeting which will take place at my home. Our family is happy to host this afternoon meeting and look forward to the working meeting and snack&social afterwards. Children are welcome – please do RSVP so arrangements can be made for snacks and childcare. Please also provide the names of any newcomers you are inviting. Thanks.
Since everyone agreed to having more structure in place for our monthly meetings, I am going to jump in and offer to have an agenda written up before the meeting so we can stay on track in terms of objectives, topics and time. It might also be a good idea to have some sort of way to monitor time so that each person can contribute but still have the meeting run on time (e.g., talking stick with timer?). Anyone with ideas for providing more structure, please offer them up.
As for the agenda, there seems to be energy around re-grouping tasks so that we can continue working in sub-teams. This might be a nice way to start off the new year in a strong and productive way. Other items that have been offered up already for the meeting are as follows:
* Schedule standing meetings (e.g., first Sunday of the month, or the like)
* Discuss whether there is interest in having a working weekend for team building and working on sub-team tasks. The thought behind this idea is that we had a productive meeting at Ute’s house but ran out of time to bring closure to items and/or to the next level. The hope is that this type of meeting will give us the springboard to move forward as a unified team as well as complete some tasks and milestones in a relatively short period of time.
* Assess commitment level (time, energy, etc) and ability of each member to contribute so that expectations can be managed as to what can actually be accomplished by when.
* Begin to work on governing principles.
* How best to build trust among the team.
If you have a topic you want discussed, please let me know and I can compile the complete list of items and email back out to the entire group by this Friday.
Lastly, there are a lot of good ideas on how we can improve our process for working together that we learned during our first major project (the holiday bazaar). Since there is likely not sufficient time to discuss this at the Jan. meeting, if you send me your ideas for what worked and what didn’t with suggested solutions, I would be happy to type up a comprehensive list so we have it for all to review and for our files.
May your holidays be filled with love and peace. See you in January! – Judy