A busy Governing Council — now with more transparency!

One of the challenges of a (mostly) volunteer organization is finding time to work on short-term and longer-term issues.  The past week has been especially busy.  When we’re so busy, transparency can suffer as we try to “get stuff done.”

On Sunday December 8, the Council had a full-day planning retreat at the home of Alice Price.  It was a long but very fruitful day.

On Thursday December 12, we had a regular monthly Council meeting to study and decide upon budget choices for next year.  It was delightful in the end, but definitely felt like work.

Imagine our collective dismay and delight when we were invited to join a meeting with Shambhala Center leaders from around North America on Sunday December 15!  Dismay because we have been doing a lot of work and it felt like the proverbial one more thing.  Delight when we realized that once we agreed on which of the several times on offer, we didn’t actually have to all be in the same place at the same time.  I took this little screen-shot from our session.  At the end of the two hour meeting I could see that Lisa Stanley, Alice Price, Corey Adkins, Michael McCormick and I were all still hanging in there (along with many dozens of people from a score of other Shambhala Centers).

Now to the transparency issue.  It’s so important but gets set aside when we are trying to “get stuff done”.  Corey Adkins has recently been appointment Secretary to the Governing Council and part of his job is to help make the Council more transparent and open.   We’ve been wanting to do that for a long time but somehow it has felt like all those meetings just took over!  Now, over to you Corey!