Jennie Stone, Board President
Good morning! My name is Jennie Stone. I am a middle-aged light-skinned female-presenting person whose pronouns are she/her. I have layered salt-and-cinnamon hair and glasses.
Last year at this time I announced my gratitude for being given the opportunity to be your Board president. In case you haven’t seen the Newsgram, I want to take this moment to announce that your Board’s executive team this year is Karen Nowicki and Kate Sloan as Vice Presidents with me as President. Once again I am humbled and so grateful that my last year on the Board is one that I can serve in this role.
If you read the Annual Report in June, you saw the description of all that the Board accomplished last year. If you didn’t read the report and would like to, it’s on the website, or you can ask me and I’ll get you a copy. Today, I am SO excited to give you a brief update on where we are now and where we hope to go during this important year.
The Board is continuing to learn and grow – by taking a UUA leadership course and by working with Rev Eric to live into our new governance model. We take very seriously our responsibility for the stewardship of the church’s mission and our governance role, which includes visioning and goal-setting, policy creation, and ongoing discernment concerning mission and outcomes. You can already see the Policy Manual, being developed in real time, on our website.
In addition, this year at our Board retreat, for the first time since I’ve been on the Board, we created a set of short-term and tentative long-term goals that provide strategic direction for our mission-driven work. These goals are based on input from you: what we heard from you in Board meetings and what we heard during our Open Question listening circles back in January. These goals also dovetail perfectly with Rev Eric’s goals for his ministry here.
The 3 short term goals are called the Annual Vision Of Ministry; they are:
- Building a strong foundation between our new minister and the UUCCH community (including Board, Teams, Staff and Families);
- Facilitating some necessary infrastructure upgrades of our property (You’ll hear more about this in the coming months); and
- Helping the congregation to stretch/reach/grow to have a bigger interfaith presence. This will involve us learning, valuing and serving as we think of outreach ministry in different ways.
We plan to hold another informational forum in October to update you on this Vision of Ministry and the progress of our governance changes. We also expect to hold another set of listening circles around an Open Question, probably in February. Watch for this opportunity to help shape the direction of our ministry for next year!
After our retreat, I lay awake at bedtime unable to go to sleep because I was so excited for the promise of our new ministry and for the vision of who we can be. If you’ll permit me an analogy – ‘cuz I need to visualize things: This church is like a train station. The Board is building the train cars and making sure the station infrastructure is working. But you all determine where the tracks will go. What is your passion? Spiritual pluralism? Transformation? Justice? Generosity? Get aboard! These trains need to leave the station!
Today is a new day my friends. As Rev Eric told us last week, WE are the prophets…by naming injustice, proclaiming a hoped-for future, then getting to work to bring that future to fruition. What are you inspired to fight for? Who are you compelled to Love for? Bring your ideas of where our trains can go and let’s build a schedule, lay some track, and ride our trains together into the future.