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MEMO TO:
Danny Bourne, President SSVDP Toronto Central Council
FROM:
Cynthia Franko, President, St. Clement Conference,
Etobicoke
DATE:
24 February 2010
RE: THE STRATEGIC PLAN
______________________________________________________________
Thank you for inviting us to comment on the Directions and
Goals of the Strategic Plan. We discussed them at our last
meeting and identified the following as the most important
to us:
-
Addressing the realities & challenges
related to home visitations.
-
Ensuring effective internal communication
between levels of the Society and externally
with our parishoners and the broader public.
-
Developing and pursuing strategies for
ensuring continued adequate funding.
-
Developing models for providing young people
with more meaningful opportunities to serve
through the Society, and
-
Moving toward greater consistency and equity
in service.
At St. Clement parish, donations have been decreasing. Our
SSVP members are strongly committed to raising parishioner
awareness regarding the work of the society and the needs
that are being met in our area. To this end we have put
together some display boards that we showcase at coffee
hours that we host after masses. We also work closely with
St. Clement School, keeping parents involved through
activity announcements in the monthly newsletter. We also
write thank you letters to the school community for their
donations. These provide case examples (guarding
confidentiality of course) so our benefactors see the real
impact of their donations. The issue of awareness is not
unique to St. Clement. We would like to see “raising
awareness” as a priority in the Strategic Plan, supported by
measurable objectives and plans. This is what we hope is
meant by “effective communication”.
We need to have measurable goals for the activities of the
Society. The directions and goals sound like a list of “To
do’s”. (We will revisit, define, seek, re-establish,
standardize etc.) The question is, what are the end results
we want to achieve? How will we measure our progress?
Once the goals are clear the activities that will help us
reach our goal will be more apparent. For instance let’s
look at spirituality. Our goal could be to have
Christ-centred conferences that seek guidance from the Holy
Spirit. How would you measure this? Perhaps a survey – ask
members if they feel their conference is Christ-centred? Do
they feel their activities have been led by the Holy Spirit.
Let them respond on a scale of 1-5 (not at all to
completely). Then let them tell you why or why not, and to
give suggestions of how conference can be more responsive to
the Holy Spirit. I think you would get some interesting
suggestions, some of which might get us closer to being
Christ centred than defining the role of the spiritual
advisor? Granted, this definition exercise may be
beneficial, but only if it brings us closer to greater
responsiveness to the Holy Spirit.
How does seeking justice for our neighbours improve our
spirituality? How does revisiting our mission etc. improve
our spirituality? Neither belong under spirituality.
Our whole strategic plan should flow from our vision
and mission. It is backwards to have us comment on a list of
operational tasks for the year and then say you are looking
at re-crafting the vision and mission. If they are to be
revisited then everything else needs to be set aside while
the vision and mission are reviewed. And as they are
fundamental to why every Vincentian does what they do,
changing the vision and mission would required broad
consultations with members. Then, strategic planning would
flow from the new vision and mission.
We talked about the vision at St. Clements. We like
“serving Christ in the poor”. If we are not, then, what is
the point of having the sSciety?
I hope these comments are helpful. Good luck with the
Strategic Plan.
Cynthia Franko
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