| I do love a good potluck. In fact, it was THE lesbian social event of choice when I first came out many years ago. So when a member at the recent spring membership meeting suggested a potluck as a way to foster relationships between members and the WES Board of Trustees, I was all over it. In fact, we have made strengthening our relationships within and with the WES community one of our goals this 2019-2020 board year. Our other two goals include updating WES policies and deepening our engagement with the American Ethical Union. Along with my fellow trustee, Kate Lang, I will be leading the work on the goal of relationship strengthening, which has several arms. We are committed to attend and be fully present at several important WES events, such as the auction, the fall and spring membership meetings, Founders’ Day celebrations, the winter and spring festivals, and more. Although we wear our trustee “hats” and represent the leadership of WES, we are also individual members who are a part of this community and interact in multiple ways, across different groups, such as SEEK, chorus, and more. Started earlier this month, we will be hosting an Ask Me Table between platforms, during the first Sunday of each month. Feel free to drop by, ask a question, share comments, or just exchange greetings with one of your WES trustees. In addition, the trustees are now overseeing a task force that is creating an annual survey-like questionnaire or census of our members. The census team, lead by Jerrod Mason, will be a fun, at times irreverent way of seeing what issues members are passionate about, what our membership looks like demographically, and where we want to put our future energies. Please be sure to lend your voice to this census when you see it. As part of our constitution, our board is responsible to lead one to two linkages a year. Organized as individual one-on-one conversations or as small group discussions, these linkages focus on a timely topic, such as reasons for giving or volunteerism. We will continue to hold these linkages since they allow members to share their views and for the board to fully listen to important perspectives. As mentioned above, the Board’s other goal is to update policies, so we will definitely focus on these changes as a possible linkage topic. We’d love to hear what people think about these policies and how we can introduce them and seamlessly add them into WES’ community fabric. In addition, because these policy changes are about conflict, we would like to work with WES staff and the Community Relations Committee (CRC) to conduct community education around conflict. We hope this can be both educational and healing for the entire community. Lastly, the Board wants to support the Stewardship Team in the spring pledging process. We intend to help in the individual outreach campaign that the Stewardship Team will organize. Who knows – we could be contacting you to talk about pledging, and how it benefits you as well as WES. We trustees want to hear what your viewpoints are, what you’re passionate about, and how we can help us move forward in our community goals. It is an honor to be in community with you. Trang Duong & Board of Trustees, 2019-2020 |
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