Neither snow nor sun kept us from our appointed task. We shoveled out and sacrificed warm days with friends. We exuberantly cooked and ate together, laughed, argued and ultimately made decisions we could all agree to. Why? To try and re-shape our future.
Members of both the Steering Committee and other active committees of the Syracuse Peace Council met six times from January through April of 2005. We met to create a plan which would affirm SPC's primary goals, guide general program direction and identify the organizational changes needed to achieve those goals. To accomplish this we evaluated our past work, challenged political assumptions and prioritized our direction.
Our first meeting centered on brainstorming. Just how did we see social change happening? What would we do if we had unlimited resources? That was fun. More realistically, we outlined what we could do with just a little more time and money, while acknowledging that we could make changes with what we currently had. Those changes involved evaluating our program work, both the issues we work on and our approach to them, and taking a hard look at our organizational structure.
We developed a list of questions to generally address both program and organizational issues. The resulting ideas became the focus of this series of meetings:
• addressing our need to bring a local focus to global issues;
The discussions surrounding these issues were often lively, sometimes confusing but always informative. We discovered differences of opinion and a variety of political experiences among us and strove diligently to reach consensus. No idea was dismissed, although some became "loose ends" passed on to the Steering Committee to resolve, such as revising the Statement of Purpose.
Discussing organizational issues led us to develop a number of goals to meet within the next few years. Of course, we spent time trying to decide how to stabilize (and increase) our funding base but were clear in our commitment to remain a basically grassroots funded organization. In addition, changes are needed to help the office run more smoothly and boost staff morale. But ultimately, we focused on the need to create a more participatory and inclusive organization. To do this our goal is to increase the diversity of SPC activists, look at how we label people (replacing words like "volunteer" and "staff") look at how leadership is selected, consider open meetings to encourage contact with leadership, and decide just what it means to be a "member" of SPC.
As a result of our meetings on program work, we identified which issues we wanted to address and how to prioritize them. Lo and behold, a set of guidelines was born, guidelines for determining what issues/actions/programs SPC will work on (the infamous moniker of "IAP Guidelines"). The IAP's are both statements and questions. The statements address our overall goals for program direction.
