CTC VISTA Project Values

All of us at Project HQ are ramping up for our recruiting round this Summer. We've already made some changes in our guidelines and priorities for organizations, and we'll be rolling out some improved process for potential VISTA members to sign-up. As part of the changes, we're going through a strategic planning and branding process. It's taking its sweet time, but part of that process is reapproaching the Mission, Vision, Values of our organization.

I wanted to post our initial draft of our Values. To help explain how we got to this point, we went through a consensus building activity---basically what we did at CTCnet, if you attended. All of us staff at HQ (Belinda, Jules and I) wrote down, each idea on a tacky note, what we value. Then we each stuck our notes on a wall. Then we went around and grouped two notes together, and then grouped those groups until we had 4 main groups. Then we tried to come up with a label for each group.

I want to explain the process since it produces some interesting results: at the beginning of the process, none of these end-values were exactly what we wrote down, but once we synthesized and synergized, this is what we got:

We Value:
Service: Working with one to benefit many for understanding and advancing a movement.

Ecologies: Mindful of cause and effect on a path to an improved state of being.

Space: Providing resources, opportunities, and context to spur new ideas and actions.

Networks: Amplifying the power of communications

We'd love to hear your feedback on these. Some of them are a little whah?!, but that's the sort of thing that comes out of the process---believe me, no one was remotely thinking "ecologies" coming into it.

Comment from Ben Sheldon on August 4, 2010 - 3:23pm

This is a test comment.