Many wonderful changes are occurring within SRI. I’m excited to share a summary of how the Board has been working with Kari, our Executive Director, to pursue SRI’s mission and values. Many of these notes come directly from our work at our Fall board retreat, as well as through our monthly board calls and committee meetings.
Kari has been thinking hard about how to build SRI into a sustainable non-profit organization, one that allows us to continue to support a growing community of educators while remaining steadfastly committed to our mission. Did you know that SRI incurs about $370,000 each year in basic operating expenses? These expenses include salaries for 3 full-time employees and 1 part-time employee, maintenance of our organizational website and library, professional service costs required for nonprofits, and many other items required to be a nonprofit organization.
SRI has been fortunate to receive continued funding from the Bay and Paul Foundation to help meet our yearly operating expenses. As our work has evolved, we continue to look for and build relationships with new funders, while also working to increase our national work and expanding fee-for-service offerings.
During our September Board meeting, Kari shared the first draft of our organizational sustainable business plan. The plan will help SRI establish stronger long-term financial footing, positioning the organization to continue to provide a community for educators who are working to help SRI fulfill our mission. Our new Professional Development Specialist, Beth Graham, is already working to design national seminar offerings, collaborating with affiliates, to be offered potentially as early as later this year.
Against the backdrop of Kari’s vision of a sustainable business model for SRI, the Board met in Denver for its annual retreat. Kari first reminded the Board about the evolution of SRI’s work. We analyzed the way our work has evolved from the Annenberg funded initiative in 1995, to the independent nonprofit being established in 2009.
As SRI established itself as a nonprofit organization, we began to make a a greater push around our mission statement, particularly in terms of our fierce commitment to educational equity and excellence. We are moving away from “critical friendship” and toward “collaboration and reflection.” Doing so not only helps us honor the legal agreement but more importantly communicates our evolving understanding of SRI work. We are no longer solely about bringing small groups of educators together to establish norms, look at student work, and use protocols to examine teacher practice and professional readings. We are also about school coaching, creating equity-centered collaborative communities, facilitative leadership, adult learning and teacher leadership.
Through Kari’s overview of the history of our organizational evolution, she pointed out that collaboration and reflection have always been central principles of this work.
At our Board retreat, we also continued our ongoing conversation around issues of equity. Focusing on the SRI mission statement, we participated in the Image Making protocol to explore what the term “fierce” looks like. From there, we tweaked an evolving version of the SRI Equity Statement using the tuning protocol to generate feedback. Look for the Equity Statement at the Winter Meeting in Denver!
We then used the Futures protocol to explore what it means organizationally to engage affiliates in SRI’s mission. Our conversation was engaging, lively and productive! We generated a wide range of possible next steps to take organizationally. Several highlights include:
- fully articulate what collaborative and reflective practices mean
- partner with education policy advocates to help affiliates learn more about what engagement in policy work can look like on a local, regional, state and national level
- develop regional support offerings for affiliates outside of the annual national Winter Meeting
- seek external funding to hire part-time regional coordinators
- design a vision for what it means to become an SRI school
- significantly improve SRI’s website.
We reviewed our current Board committees in light of the direction SRI is headed. The operating committees for the upcoming year include:
- Mission Committee
- Finance Committee
- Governance Committee
- Affiliate Development Committee
- Outreach Committee
We then each took at a stab at drafting our SRI story. Kari is studying strategies that non-profits use to successfully tell their story. She invited each board member to write their own story using the following prompts:
- Once upon a time (start story and introduce main character)
- And every day (life before SRI)
- Until one day (begins the action – inciting incident)
- And because of this (barriers/obstacles)
- Until finally (end the story and find resolution).
We will use these individual stories on our website and in other materials to help people understand what it means to be a part of the SRI community.
We closed the retreat by each identifying a fierce commitment that we, as board members, are willing to make between now and WM.
I am excited to see many of you at our upcoming Winter Meeting in Denver. There are two specific opportunities for engaging with the Board of Directors: the Breakfast with the Board on Saturday morning from 7:30-8:30am ; and the Annual Meeting of the Organization on Saturday from 1:00-3:00PM MST. The agenda for the Meeting of the Organization can be found here. We hope you can join us in person. However, if you are not able to be physically present in Denver, we invite you to join us virtually. Email Kari (kari@schoolreforminitiative.org) and she will share the webinar login information for the meeting.
It is an exciting time in SRIs organizational growth. We are very thankful for your commitment to SRI as an organization and for all you do to make schools more equitable places for students.
With gratitude,
Pat Norman
SRI Board Chair
