The Follow-up

So, I mentioned that retreat I was going to go to on Saturday in my last post. Saturday has come and gone, and I have a notebook and mind full of ideas and information. I brought my little notebook that I write (quotes, among other things) in and filled up at least half of it, I'd think. And there was tasty organic food. Cheese and pumpkin bread and rye bread and fruit. Tasty tasty!

Kore Press in a non-profit organization/company. The meeting was mostly about how to run it. It has been running for eighteen years as a small press, but the vision (we talked a lot about the vision/ mission) has possibly changed. That was the topic of debate. Also, Lisa and Shannon, the co-founders and "Queens" of Kore want to make Kore larger, possibly national and international. Right now we are pretty much a Tucson thing, even though the small press world knows of us. So, while I didn't learn much more about publishing, specifically, I did learn a lot about how a non-profit works.

There is the board and the staff. And depending on what sort of company you have, the board will do various things (a fact I learned during "teach Samone" time). We were trying to find out what Kore's board should do. That is just a small part of the whole meeting. I'm pretty sure we decided that the board and the staff need to be like one group in two bodies. Since Kore has been and shall remain to be about Lisa's creative vision, the board must be the support for that, while the staff must execute it. Still, it was emphasized that much melding must take place. They didn't like the idea of traditional rigid seperation.

Strategic plan! So, each non-profit, maybe all organizations, I don't know, must draft a strategic plan that outlines their direction and plan for the next however many years. 3 seemed to be a good number. What goes into a strategic plan? Mostly dry stuff, with a little sprinkling of a vibrant shout-out to the mission. "Vibrant" was a word that was thrown around a lot. But what do you expect from a room full of English major women. But the bulk of the document is to be concerning fundraising: the how, the why, the how much. Also marketing and communication. How to get Kore's name out there.

I left that bright house with a lot on my mind. The nuts and bolts were easiest to wrap my head around. And, lucky for me, it was clearly stated that Kore has always been about the mission/ vision, that all the business and practical aspects revolve around the mission, not the other way around. Lucky because that directly addresses my research question. In addition to that are the ideals that these women are promoting. They weigh heavy on my mind. Such thoughts culminated into a question that leads to many others: can I immerse myself in an environment and not absorb everything? Can I choose what I internalize without loosing the big picture? Should I try to do that? Will I loose myself? How much of growth and progress is good/needful and can I grow without abandoning myself? Can people with drastically differing views get along? Do they need to?

Yeah, so lots of currently unanswered questions. And they may very well remain unanswered, which I'll be fine with, I suppose. Oof, I've nothing else to write. How do you write so much Joseph?!

~Samone