First Retreat Over.....Many More to Come?

Well, our first retreat is over and done with and Holy Cow did we get alot accomplished.  Of course, "mama bear" and I had to have a little disagreement that the rest of the Board had to witness, but alas (I love saying alas), we HAVE been friends since we were 12, so it's all good and rest assured that we are still the best of friends.  If you can't disagree with the important people in your lives - who can you disagree with?  Anyway, I digress, we have a clear plan of where ERK is headed for 2012 and what we ARE going to accomplish. I say ARE because I truely believe that none of us on the Board will accept defeat on the proposed accomplishments.  One of the main things that we worked together on today was new Mission and Vision Statements.  Our old Mission Statement didn't cover everything that we have been doing since we added our Elderly Program and up to this point we had never had a Vision Statement; per se.  Our new Mission Statement is unbelievable and we as a Board ROCKED it in working together to come up with it;  "Our Mission is to give to those in need at the times they need it most.  We do this by providing much needed items at critical times of the year to create a better quality of life." and our Vision Statement is "Our vision is helping our future by helping our community."  Okay, maybe we had a Vision Statement but it only included the kids in our community and as you know we are now reaching out to the elderly too.  We had a brainstorming session this afternoon to come up with fundraising ideas and I'm not going to go into detail yet because we need to do some more research on these ideas but I think we are going to have a great year as far as fundraising goes.  Tavherlee has been and will be applying for many more grants and we now have official committees for things like Marketing, Finance, Statistics etc. and someday soon we will have other non profits wanting to grow up to be "just like us" - LOL!  I am so excited about how far we have come in just 2 short years (believe it or not our 2nd anniversay is in February) and I can only imagine where we will be in the future.  Thank you again for being there when we need you, without our volunteers and donors we wouldn't be celebrating our anniversay and all the things we have accomplished in the last 2 years.