July 14, 2021
Hello SRI Community,
In May, we messaged around the realities for needed change in SRI. Our past eleven years as an independent organization have been marked by wonderful growth and successes. However, we have also learned that doing everything on your own (as an independent organization and nonprofit) can be challenging, expensive, and ultimately hard to sustain. We are committed to seeing SRI’s legacy and work continue, and we also know after a year of serious taking-stock work that it must look different.
To that end, the SRI board developed and received a grant from the Bay and Paul Foundations to help us with continued organizational development and “futuring” work. After reviewing proposals for SRI from consultants, the board has engaged Shepherd Impact. We just completed an initial meeting with Allison Brown and Maddison Abboud last week, and we are very confident in their approach, expertise, and experience to aid us in our next phase of organizational development. They have helped us organize the transition into a few stages.
We have started the initial phase of defining and framing the task. This includes identifying our assets, weaknesses, and aspects of our enduring legacy to preserve moving forward. The board started some of this upfront foundational/framing work with Shepherd Impact so that we can then bring on community members for the next steps.
This will be the work of the small “Phoenix Committee” that was identified in our previous message. After meeting with our consultants, we have a better sense of role, timeline, and commitment. This committee will lead planning for sustaining our legacy going forward and leading initial steps involved in that work. We anticipate that it will meet virtually every 2-4 weeks between August-December, with some additional tasks between meetings. We heard from some community members after our last message that wanted to be of service to SRI in this process, and wanted to reach out one more time to invite you to engage in this opportunity.
Please email Chris Jones, chris@schoolreforminitiative.org, if you would like to be considered by the board for this advisory committee.
Thank you,
SRI Board of Directors, Aaron Goodson, Angela Breidenstein, Brian Sparks, DJ Alexander, Lauren Levine, Lisa Kuh, & National Office Manager, Chris Jones
P.S.
There are also other ways to support SRI. One is direct donations through http://schoolreforminitiative.wildapricot.org/Contribute-to-SRI. Another is continuing to join and renew as a paid affiliate: https://www.schoolreforminitiative.org/sri-affiliation/. A third is to continue to buy resource books: https://www.schoolreforminitiative.org/store/#!/SRI-Resource-Book-ver-3-0/p/33141189/category=0. We have a fresh reprint of 1,000 books to meet your summer session needs.
