Long Range Planning Committee - April 1999

The three Congregation-wide meetings on long range planning have been held and now the next task for the Long-range planning committee is to prepare a report to the Congregation and the Board. We propose to have a draft completed by April. Lew Barsky, a long-term member of the Congregation, worked with the committee to design the planning or "visioning" process and acted as the facilitator at each meeting. Lew, a psychologist, specializes professionally in helping institutions plan for and deal with change. Each meeting was designed as a natural progression toward developing a vision of how we want our Congregation to look in the next five or more years.

The first of three sessions focused on the congregation’s history, what we as a congregation are most proud of, and on our basic values. The second meeting concentrated on our preferred future, what we want our Congregation to look like in the future, while we also thought about barriers to that future and contradictions or dilemmas between some of our goals. The final session was an attempt to prioritize the preferred goals. While we had hoped to strategize about the steps necessary to achieve our preferred goals, we ran out of time at the last meeting and this concerns the committee. We have discussed what can be done to develop strategies and once we have recommendations on solutions to this problem, we will make them to the Board.

The initial wonderful outcome was a clear statement of the broad values which are important to us: God and Torah; Jewish education and study; our congregational family; social action in our community and the world around us. The results of the third meeting will be available once the draft report is prepared because space limitations here preclude a full list. If you would like copies of the handouts for the third meeting, please contact Toby Grossman.

Thank you to the members of the committee, the congregation members who served as facilitators, Lew Barsky, and especially to each of you who participated in the meetings.

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