A Refreshed Strategy for CWNC

This year, I was honored to participate in a strategic planning process with the board and staff of Cooperate WNC. My role was to bring a community member and volunteer perspective, along with one other volunteer advisor. We worked with our community’s wise and inspiring Diana McCall of Artemis Consulting, to look at Cooperate WNC’s relational context and positionality, assess the organization’s underlying tensions and contradictions toward a practical vision, and then synthesized over 67 ideas into four strategic directions to guide CWNC’s work over the next year.

1. Developing Effective Volunteer, Membership, and Leadership Programs

2. Defining Scope, Creating Design, and Implementing Operational Plan

3. Engaging Community to Nurture Mutual Aid

4. Establishing Organizational Sustainability Through Fundraising and Communications

Consider these four directions as paths, leading CWNC from core challenges around strategy, position, leadership, and engagement, toward success metrics of clarity, trust, distributed leadership, and more resources to serve the community. The group has already come up with focused implementation to take CWNC toward success in these goal areas for the next year, and emerged from the planning process with a 90-day work plan for each of the four directions, as if to imagine trees along each path, laden with edible fruits. In the coming year, I’m excited to witness some of these fruits ripening, through the telling of rich stories about how CNWC has impacted individuals and community, balanced relationships with the work for CWNC staff and leadership, honed program offerings, and a deepened sense of identity related to CNWC’s place in the ecosystem of our unique place and time. 

For me, engaging with this process was a new way of being involved with CWNC. The resounding impact of this experience for me was to witness the incredible thought, care, and commitment that the board and staff bring to each conversation. Just as we don’t see all the inner workings of the Earth as she brings us life and holds us daily, it’s always a good reminder that there’s so much more going on beneath the surface than the eye can behold. It’s the same with our neighbors and community who are working to conceive creative services in support of us all. I’m happy for the CWNC team as this year comes to a close, and hope that they feel inspired, supported, and clearly guided as they go forward. And, I’m rewarded to have been able to contribute. As the people of CWNC give deeply of their energies and passion for growing a cooperative community rooted in solidarity and care, consider giving in reciprocity this year, in turn. This qualitative work of visioning, strategy, and service call for both quantitative financial support, and reciprocal community engagement going forward. 

I hope you’ll join me in celebrating the work of strategy refinement for CWNC, and stay tuned for the fruits that are to come. In the meantime, please consider committing support and intention to the organization as you are inspired.