Something New
This summer the board decided to hold a workshop of guided conversation with members. We had three goals:
- Gather information the board would use to revise UUCB’s End policies (more on that later)
- Identify and prioritize questions the Board and congregation will work on — together — over the next few years
- Engage with members as moral owners of UUCB in an ongoing process to shape our future.
We held the first Café Conversation on a Saturday morning in late June. People liked it so much they asked us to hold another one for members who missed it. So, a few weeks later we held another café after the Sunday service. In all, some 90 members participated—more than a quorum of the members.
At the end of the cafés we organized an extensive set of questions roughly into clusters by subject and then voted for the clusters we thought were the most important. Based on the combined results from the two cafés, the five most important themes were:
- Diversity & Outreach (90 votes)
- The Community Beyond Our Walls (64)
- A Sustainable UUCB (48)
- Spiritual Growth & Transformation (45)
- Our Beloved Community (42)
Using What We Learned
As we promised the participants, the board used these questions at our summer retreat last month to begin rewriting what Policy Governance calls the church’s Ends policies. In this way we ensure that the Ends align with members’ values and are rooted in what you have told us is important.
A Good End
If you’re looking for poetry in the Ends policies, you may be disappointed. Although our understanding of Ends has come a long way since we implemented Policy Governance at UUCB, it is still evolving. Here’s a good example of an End that a school board might write: “Before moving on to 2nd grade, children can read.”
The End clearly identifies 1) what the benefit is (reading), 2) who benefits (children), and 3) the priority (no qualifiers; “just do it.”) Figuring out how this will be accomplished — what Policy Governance calls the “Means” — will be the job of the school principal and teachers (at UUCB that would be the Coordinating Team).
Next Steps
We will now take the draft Ends to the Coordinating Team to get their input at a Roundtable scheduled for September 28 and then publish the draft for public comment. We hope to adopt the final version at the October board meeting.
We also promised café participants that we would produce a set of prioritized questions the board and congregation will explore together, along with a rough timeframe for doing so. The café evaluations and list of questions are available on the information table in the Atrium. The board is currently working on what format that exploration might take, so stay tuned.
For more information on any of the above or for the complete list of questions, facilitators’ notes and participant evaluations of the cafés, please contact Jane Middleton.
Your UUCB Board of Trustees:
Jean Gleason, President
John Bailey
Kathleen Baumgardner
Stephanie Ann Blythe
Lynnette Delgado
Ladie Malek
Jane Middleton, Vice President
Deborah Schmidt
Virginia Silver-Rimbach
