Updated: Mar 5
At the monthly BIEPA members' meeting on 27th February, the management team presented an outline of a proposed strategic plan aimed at maximising our impact by activating our membership.
It is the management team's job to define our strategy, but of course we absolutely want it to take into account input from all members, so we are looking for volunteers to help us flesh out the details.
Read on to find out more about the plan, and scroll to the end to see how you can help...
Coming up with a plan
Late last year we held a series of strategic planning workshops involving the BIEPA management committee and enthusiastic BIEPA members Darren Jew, Cecelia Wilson, and Hari Kotrotsios, facilitated by the brilliant Mary Burgess of Woven Memories.
We came to the conclusion that coming up with ideas for projects and goals is not our primary problem; we had no shortage of things that BIEPA could or should be doing. In fact the breadth and depth of things we need to do often feels overwhelming.
No, our main challenge is in expanding and activating our membership so that we have enough people to run all our projects — without overloading anyone — so we can get things done that actually make a difference. It's not enough to just make lots of noise; we have to work smarter to have a tangible impact.
So we came up with a plan that defines BIEPA's mission in such a way that we can break it down into a set of mission teams, each one focused on a specific aspect of our overall mission. Each team can define their own goals, and will execute projects to achieve those goals. It's up to each team to decide how much effort they can commit to their projects. This limits what each team has to worry about, making their own goals feel more achievable.
Important: All our existing projects will find a home in one of the missions teams; we are not shutting down any projects.
We also came up with a vision statement, and have started to define some common policies and procedures that will guide all the mission teams. This is information that we need to provide when applying for grants, for example.
Please bear in mind that we are all volunteers doing this in our spare time, so we have taken our time to try and get it right, and we are very aware that there's more work to be done. That's where all our other BIEPA members come in.
Our vision statement
Our vision statement should be a succinct description of how we want things to be in the future. It's tempting to try to put lots of good things into this, but then it can become an unwieldy sentence reminiscent of a legal document!
We decided to keep it short but sweet:
Bribie, an island sanctuary where life flourishes.