From Renata Reid, Chair Subud California, to Haris Wolfgang and Liza Ramey of Subud Portland:

Hello Haris and Liza,
I’m happy to report that our recent Revitalizing our Centers/Region Workshops were a great success.

We did two separate sessions over our Labor Day weekend congress. The first session was with the council and dewan. The second session was with the membership as a workshop.

Both groups had lively conversations- especially the break out and re-grouping done with the membership.

Both groups did two separate sessions; GOALS or a vision that they have for the region or center and an ACTION PLAN to realize their goals.

What we did not get to was coming to the final single purpose or “mission statement” that distilled this new direction. I’m hoping that this can still be done with member participation via email, newsletter or even Facebook.

I encouraged the members to consider inviting you to come to do deeper work and to continue the process. The response was overwhelmingly favorable. I think most people were grateful for the opportunity to be heard and to be a part of a process of discovery and focus.
Our national chair, Daniel Stralburg also participated and said he’d like to share this with the other regions.

You guys are really on to something. Thank you for sharing your vision with all of us and for supporting me in taking it out to the California members.

There are many things that can be followed up on but one thing that is of particular interest to me is something that continues to come up. When there are centers that are struggling for whatever reason, we agreed that it would be great to have support and encouragement from another center that is flourishing. We discussed the idea of creating a National or even International Sister Center Initiative. Similar to what Liza had mentioned about Sonoma connecting with Portland to gain support, we could help connect centers to each other for mutual benefit and support.

This also dovetails into another idea, that of utilizing our material and human resources better. We have resources to share with each other. I primarily mean reaching out to our members who are experts at various things, sharing our expertise and talents, mentoring younger, newer members and groups etc…

I could go on and on but I’ll stop now. You have really started something! Bravo!!

Daniel asked me to share the results of our two sessions. I will compile them in the next couple days and send you a copy if you’d like.

With much appreciation,

Renata