Strategic Planning, Biotches!!

Just spent an unrecoverable day and a half of my life in strategic planning with our nonprofit board, facilitated, as it turns out, by a group that's the beneficiary of Bush's faith based initiative program. We're grateful for the $2300 in free inkind training. Still not sure how I feel about Bush's faith based initiatives. Needless to say, my brain is dribbling out of my ears right about now. But I helped craft our vision (almost singlehandedly) because of my supposedly wonderful English-composition-person perspective, and I think a lot of progress was made in other places as well.

But I'm still amazed at how clueless those who sign up for the board are about the every day operations of this agency. Example questions me and Director/buddy were asked that should be obvious to anyone that serves on the board:

We have computer classes??
We have a website??
Is that program meeting our organizational goal? (Don't you decide what our organizational goals are??)

We were actually sent out of the room by the facilitator for around 10-15 minutes. I think she was chewing out the board for our incredibly low salaries. Her jaw dropped when she asked what our budget was, and we told her $60,000. What about after you include salaries? That includes salaries. Shortly afterward, we were sent out of the room. I expect so that the board could say what it felt about the lack of money without us taking extreme offense and jumping to the obvious conclusion that we were "undervalued."

We'll see what comes of it. Right now, my brain is just toast.

-- Virgil