At the beginning of the Facebook discussion as described two posts
ago the EC member wrote - in corrected form
Essentially,
we've tried to focus our very limited numbers of people and funds on the few
top priorities ...
If I read the accounts correctly the General Assembly's income for the year 2009/10 was over £650,00. There are some 11 staff - not all full-time. When I did a count a year or two ago of the number of volunteers in the commissions and panels I counted over 100. These are people with expertise in spiritual matters as well as business matters such as finance, fundraising, PR, marketing, strategic development, governance, report writing, communications, web-design, etc. There are other skills there too such as artistic, educational, social policy and working with young people. This is only those people directly volunteering for the General Assembly and does not include those involved with national societies let alone the districts or local congregations and fellowships.
In my world we are resource rich. What a wealth of resources - human and otherwise. What we also have is an enormous amount of good will from most Unitarians in the UK and elsewhere in the world.
But if we keep getting told that we are poor and have limited resources we will begin to believe it. Perhaps if you think you are resource poor then there is no expectation that much can be achieved. I would dearly love someone on the EC to invite us to celebrate how rich we are as a faith community and then to expect great things.
Problems are local and broader - encouraging and co-ordinating skills to best effect, communicating for best practice across people with skills, getting the right mix of autonomy for getting on with the job and accountability. Skills need plans to exploit them.
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ReplyDeleteThanks Adrian. I understood the original comment from Andy to refer to the EC with its governance restructure which is clearly about how things get taken forward nationally.
ReplyDeleteI think that some localities do well encouraging people to use their skills. Where there is someone(s) with the time and the skills these get co-ordinated. One of our problems locally is that there tends not to be any one person with the non-ministerial leadership role. This is often the case for districts as well.
It will be interesting to see what the Local Leadership strategic group comes up with. Louise x
P.S. Original comment deleted because of spelling error.
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