Purpose/Agenda Item

Action/Result

Person(s)

Responsible

Due Date/ Completed

Team Building Exercise

Rev. Dowgiert led team building excise based on three questions related to board members’ vision of UUCT over the next three years. Rev. Dowgiert asked what observations came from questions she posed.

• The need to begin thinking about facing up to issues of space and location.
• How do we come to grips with the issue of immigration; focusing on this and making it a very visible issue for the congregation and community?
• Can we address environmental issues by becoming a green sanctuary and looking at limited water resources in community? Can we be a role model for other churches and people in the community by rehabilitating our buildings?
• Can we build relationships and keep the covenant of right relations alive? Among other things, this would make it easier for policy governance work. To better reflect its management and administrative work, we may need to change the name of the Empowerment Team. There is concern about the apparent disconnect between board and the Empowerment Team.
• The need to build intergenerational relationships and integrate younger families came up.
• Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights should continue to be a focus.

Policy Governance Overview

Fran Brazzell provided an overview on key principles of policy governance. She also reviewed UUCT documents that provide the framework for governance i.e. by-laws, policies and procedures. Under policy governance a critical role of the board is to oversee the strategic plan through series of monitoring reports based on objectives and benchmarks. She distributed a copy of the monitoring schedule established by the Board last year. Monitoring is both proactive and relative to issues that arise. When issues come up, the first question the board should ask is whether or not existing policies cover the issue. If policies are not being followed, the board needs to determine whether policies need to change or some corrective action is required. Ends statements are embodied in policy governance.

Game Plan for New Strategic Plan

Suggestions for gaining input from the congregation included conducting a survey, meeting with people one on one, having small group sessions of 20 or 30 people, utilizing the expertise of covenant circle facilitators. The purpose would to get a sense of where we would like to be in three years.

Issues for the future fall in two broad categories--temporal and faith based. John Schaefer posed a series of questions related to the broad issue areas:

• Are we meeting the needs of all the age groups?
• How are we communicating with each other, bonding with each other?
• Are our meeting places adequate?
• Do we need to think seriously about a new sanctuary?
• How do we take care of the facilities we have?
• How do we deal with homeless problem—people camping out on our property?

Next steps include:

• Do a brief article for the next newsletter letting people now the strategic planning process is coming.
• Board members will brain storm their own lists of questions related to our vision of the future and e-mail them to Fran one week prior to the September board meeting (the Tuesday before). These will be reviewed at the September board to see if patterns emerge and how that impacts the planning process. The goal will be to come up with the planning at the September board meeting.
• Once the board has done its own brain storming and determined next steps, put a more extensive article about the strategic planning process in the October newsletter.
• Get word out about strategic planning at the leadership and nominating workshop Oct. 17^th.
• Devote the day reserved on calendar in October for the minister’s workshop day to strategic planning.

Fran Brazzell

All board members