The March 2014 board meeting will happen right here on Monday, March 10 at 1pm ET. Scroll to the bottom of the screen to watch here, and tweet your participation to the hashtag #CTFuture.
This month's board meeting will be a brief one with just two items to discuss / act upon:
Item 1: Adding new board member Justin Pollock to the board.
Item 2: Loan from Hildy Gottlieb to Creating the Future.
The purpose of the loan is to hire / retain support staff, to free Hildy and Dimitri to pursue the organization's goals for the year. The loan would be zero interest, due when the organization has the capacity to pay it back, and payable in whatever increments the organization has the capacity to pay at a time.
Currently, the work that would be done by support staff is all done by Hildy and Dimitri, in addition to the organization's program work. Hildy provides all bookkeeping support for Creating the Future. She provides all administrative support – from setting appointments to following up emails and all website requests, to supporting the board's needs, to everything in between. She also handles all engagement and coordination of volunteers. Dimitri provides all IT support, from computer repair to web / domain / hosting support to everything in between.
All that is done by the two founders in addition to their "real job" of finding partners and moving the organization's programs / mission forward.
Creating the Future's goals for the year are substantial.
1) Continuing efforts begun last year – the ongoing development of faculty to teach on behalf of Creating the Future, ongoing engagement of leaders for our online communities.
2) Demonstration Project with the Pennsylvania Association of Nonprofit Orgs and the Community Foundation of Westmoreland County
3) Ongoing engagement of participants in all aspects of the movement and the organization
4) Find partners, bring them together with Creating the Future's board, and together develop the plan that will lead Creating the Future to accomplish its mission. The partners we seek are true partners (vs silent financial partners) who want to learn alongside us, plan alongside us, apply what we jointly learn and the plan we jointly create to each of our own work – with each of us putting into the pot what we have to share.
In addition, it is our intent to execute as many as 6 immersion courses this year, while training two new instructors to teach that course (to increase our capacity to teach more and more of these courses). And lastly, Hildy will be taking several months on a writing sabbatical, to author at least a book on the Continuum of Potential (at the request of Creating the Future's fellows), and perhaps also a book on Creating the Future's theory of change overall.
Through all these efforts, it is our intent that Hildy and Dimitri will finally be able to begin taking a salary from Creating the Future. However, none of this will be possible if the two founders continue to provide all their own support.
At our April meeting, the board will resume its planned discussion topic – the beginning of our conversations about financial oversight. Due to the fact that Hildy and Dimitri have the primary information about the organization's finances, and the fact that, because they are teaching an immersion course on Monday, they can only get away for 30-45 minutes for the March meeting, the board decided to postpone beginning that discussion until the April meeting. So please, put that date in your calendar (Monday, April 14 at 1pm ET) – we'll look forward to your being part of that conversation!
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