Asset Enhancement Task Force Update

Greetings from your Asset Enhancement Task Force!

In keeping with our goal of full congregational awareness of our processes and activities, going forward we will have a note in Church & Home each month about our current and upcoming work.

Upon the conclusion of our initial task as a committee to clarify and define the need for staff wage adjustments and how we as a community live out our call to God’s love through the compensation of our staff, as well as a need to meet the market in hiring for new open positions, we have moved into the next phase of our work together.  

We are operating from a “learning agenda” framework by uncovering what questions we need to answer in order to make an informed statement or ensure that our suggested actions are based on evidence and informed by values. This assumes that our end goals are the result of a process, not fixed outcomes to be obtained. We are beginning the process of engaging with these ideas in great depth and with great care, bearing in mind that we are a community comprised of many perspectives and many needs.  

As such, the committee has identified the following End Goals:   

• Comprehensive Inventory of the following 5 Asset Categories:
  • People
  • Relationships 
  • Property 
  • Money  
  • Reputation  

• Reasonable understanding of current status/valuation of Asset Categories
• Understanding of anticipated needs in all 5 categories. 
• Ability to articulate relationship between all asset categories and create a tool/value statement for future use that helps us determine whether our assets are being utilized for church goals.
• Strategic response to anticipated needs. 
• Congregational awareness and access to our processes and information throughout.
   

We are working under the following Assumptions:  

• Along the way we may uncover hopes, dreams and visions of who we are becoming as a congregation and this may shape or change how we process or proceed towards these end goals.  
• There will be times when it is appropriate to focus primarily on one asset category more than another; and times when it is imperative that we can articulate the relationship between asset categories and recognize the larger system.   
• Structures and systems of racial injustice are embedded in our histories, our processes, and thinking. We must be continuously curious and open for the ways they show up.
• Our underlying faith and justice values should always be the primary driver of why we make the choices we make.
  

Upcoming work: 

Over the coming months, we will be working to comprehensively identify our assets as listed above and begin to gain an understanding of their relationships to each other and our work as a church community.  

We look forward to engaging with you all in this process and working toward identifying where we are and creating a framework that will enable us to make meaningful choices about our future in community with each other and the wider world. 

Thank you for joining us on this journey! 

AETF Committee Members: Ed Coleman, Don Guthrie, Carol Ingram, Joyce Jackson, Tim Kroll, Fran Lewis Cristin Miller, Carol Nelson, Amy Roon, Kyna Schilling, Kathy Williams