Process minutes: 2016-10-15

Special Notes:

Skills and Thrills 2016 wll be rescheduled per 11/2 community meeting

Agenda:

Skills and Thrills Planning Meeting
topic and comments/questions about the topic
outside leader/expert
kids activities and childcare
meals and snacks
extra activities (including election-related)
promotion of the weekend!

Minutes:

Present: Patti, Becky H, Jillian

Tevah and Tema and Anastasia were interested in helping plan but not able
to come today.

At our last meeting, after discussion with Jennifer, we discussed
encouraging GOers to do phone banking on Sunday after the event is done. On
email Helen said there will be phone banking at the Jackson Rd. office
Sunday, 5-7, 7-9pm. 5060 Jackson Road, Suite H. Has parking. Between Wagner
and Zeeb in the strip mall by Giardino's. Helen: You can call Sam Larson
(617) 833-1326 to get info about this.
MONKEY: Jillian to call the number to ask, is it ok if people show up or do
they need to call in advance. Also ask do people use their own phones.

When is Skills and Thrills 2016 event?
Saturday, Nov. 5, 9am - 4pm
Sunday, Nov. 6, 1pm-3pm

Outside facil/leader - $500 for 10 hours. Jenny Tubbs from Zingerman's is
available and willing to lead us in the visioning which is exciting.

Childcare -
MONKEY:Jillian will check back in with Fatima about Bruno's friend, if she
will be available both days and can commit to this.
UPDATE 10/19/16: Bruno decided not to, Jillian emailed out again, Elizabeth
Allen and Annaliese Schuster-Donahue will do so, yay!

Long discussion of Syndallas question/comments about the topic. Appreciated
her thoughtful comments.

Maybe this could be related to the extra fund like Sunward has?

I feel like the topic Syndallas brought up is pretty high level - both for
work system and for budget priorities - it's really, look at the big
picture structure of how we created Great Oak to run. Idea that the
committees are responsible for many things, and are responsible for
communicating their activities regularly to the community, and, that we
all, since we are all great oak, are responsible for giving them feedback,
getting involved, and questions or issues can be brought to community
meeting at any time if that does not resolve the issue.

Key thing was the community does not have the time/focus/stamina to dig
deep in to each responsibility area - wanted and needed to delegate that to
the committees who can focus in and spend time figuring out the priorities
and figuring out how to implement them, many that repeat year to year;
however, need to make sure there is enough connection between committees
and full community - enough communication, enough opportunity for feedback
and course-correction as needed. Committees responsible for documenting,
communicating, being receptive to input. Individuals to take responsibility
to chime in and give feedback when they feel something is off course, go
direct, discuss, and then bring to community if not satisfying resolution.
Idea was process or steering could assist with issues that need a way to
come to community meeting.

I think what she's describing is like what used to happen in ICC because so
much turnover every single year. And we found that the successful way
around it is to have a longer term plan for committees to refer to, way
longer than a season. Which is what we're aiming to do. I think it's very
possible to think about getting a vision in some bigger areas of the
community so committees can use as a guidepost in setting goals and it
helps others give feedback to committees too. Give the community a chance
to grapple with what we want and come up with 3 to 5 important areas the
community wants to attend to.

There's not time to have more in person cmty discussions about big picture
plan for the weekend, before the weekend happens, and way too complex to do
on email and have a coherent result.

Things people want to discuss are going to bubble to the top, so hopefully
we could hone in on an area too during our time together.

I think we decided we would start with the full group and broad view and
then use that as a tool to hone in to committees areas / interest areas.

I feel like we need to hone in, we can't just do the vision during this
weekend.

We were hoping to do some of that honing in on Sunday and also at a series
of prescheduled 1 hour slots at community meetings in
January/February/March.

If this process we're talking about works, it would impact the budgets of
all committees - committees would share information about how their budget
requests supports one or more aspects of the vision. The committee would
weigh their decisions against this vision. Its kind of like a community
mandate for our top areas. Take steps in that direction. More of a shared
understanding of where we're going.

And hopefully making it easier for an individual to give feedback to a
committee on something if you feel like they're not setting their
priorities correctly. You can refer to the vision.

What will the flow be?
Wide and then narrow - what does the 'narrow' mean - special interest
groups? cmtees? Just small groups? Next two meetings will have Jenny too.

How can we do creative marketing of this weekend? Skits? Things at dinners?
Song? Come up with wild and crazy visions to share?

Fliers and email is good. But what else? How to encourage new members and
old members to come.

Great Oak in 2022

Come set the direction of Great Oak for its next half-decade.

The vision we come up with is supposed to be do-able, right?

The existing vision statement is such a broad picture. Really actually,
maybe its a Mission statement. We want a more "operational vision" for
2022.

It has to walk the line of being exciting and inspiring, but not so out
there that you just feel overwhelmed like it'll never happen.

Want people to sit and think about it a bit. 2022. How old am I. How old
are my kids What is dinner like. What does the CH kitchen look like and our
landscape look like. How are our relations with our wider neighbors. What
is our block like now that we have all these new neighbors! How is our
population balance of older and younger members.

MONKEY: Jillian will find out, does Zing have marketing materials they
share about visioning?

When did we last do demographics? Gabe was 8.

We could put slips of paper with funny questions, or not necessarily funny,
different for each
will more bldgs have solar panels
will we communicate by drone between units or between communities
will we all have the book of agreements memorized
will dinners be all kale smoothies all the time
will all of our flotsam be wrangled
will GO have a west node shade structure
will the majority of common meals be from local produce and/or organic
will all households come to community meetings
will people talk with each other when they have concerns, and work through
them
Instead of alternative meetings will we have mindfulness meditation
practice nights
will we have monthly group road trips or service projects
will the north CH plaza be the happenin-est spot in the neighborhood

how to keep reminding people about it in a funny way.

Will GO ... ? Come and find out! Nov 5 and 6.

MONKEY: Patti will update Meals details. Free to skils and thrills
participants.

Before we do too much promotion we should check in with Jenny.

Advertise it as visioning but not only visioning.

Lots of stuff on the zingtrain site:

A picture of the success of a project at a specific point in time. the
actual destination. A vivid description of what success looks like for us.

(Mission statement is like the north star, out there farther.)

Visioning helps us stay the course. Vision must be: inspiring,
strategically sound, documented, communicated

Then, the strategic plan is the map to get there.

So the committees would create their maps.
Great Oak has not taken the time to develop a vision for the future. We
have our statement from 2001 but nothing since. Setting our direction for
our life together.

Committees have to create their roadmaps for how to work toward the vision.
We have to have a decent shot at making the vision happen.

Do that work in the full group as well as cmtee prework.

See if Jenny might be available 10/24 too? Help us start working on
communicating.

We should make an announcement at Monday's meeting.

Our next definite meeting is 10/27, 7pm. Feels like too far off so we'll
look in to 10/24 and do some stuff on email or phone with Jenny Tubbs.

Skills and thrills more details:
Food: middle eastern for lunch, star's cafe - lentils/rice (mjdarra),
hummus, pita, falafel, fatoosh with pita chips on the side. ? Can change if
we get feedback folks want something else.
Coffee/milk/ x 2 days
bagels and GF/ cream cheese/butter
mid afternoon chocolate x 2 days
chips n salsa for Sunday

Sarah was going to put a survey in cubbies of teens and tweens to find out
if they have any requests for events on Saturday/Sunday.
Something in the game room?
Karaoke?
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with Sarah to see if she heard anything back.

Saturday night - dessert potluck and dance?
Always hard to find someone to do the music but maybe lets ask.

MONKEY: Jillian will send out an email to see if someone would like to
create a dance playlist. Nice to have a good mix of old and new music.

Dessert potluck at 6:30?

--end--