[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Dear ELGL members,
Took a two week break in reporting because I was vacationing vacationing vacationing in celebration of turning 40. But I’m back and have some cool things to report and share with the membership. Thanks for your patience!
What I’m reading:
- Evicted by Matthew Desmond (I started reading this a few weeks ago but then had to take a break to read some Lucky Day library finds…)
- Also loving the tweets from the Hometown Summit, looks like it was a great conference (and I’m not just saying that because Kent and Ben were there all week).
What I’m listening to:
- S-Town – I loved it so much! It was as good as Ben and Kent have raved about in their ELGL blogs.
What I’m watching:
- The Americans – I’m obsessed again.
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A huge project on our horizon is the realignment of ELGL’s digital services with our mission and values. We’ve been blogging about it and have a survey out right now to collect your ideas and feedback about the ELGL organization.
Luke Fretwell and Kevin Herman from ProudCity are leading this effort for us and it’s super fun to work with them. The process they’re leading is different than what we would experience if we worked for a city, but it’s close and so it’s awesome to see their keen understanding and belief in mission driven work experiences, and how you tell your story to promote understanding, awareness, and action.[/vc_column_text][vc_text_separator title=”Professional Services” color=”green”][vc_column_text]In my last update I wrote about making the transition to having a paid ELGL executive director (me). We’ve been kicking around some ideas on how to make this happen, without changing the values and structure of our organization. We’ve heard from some people with ideas like “raise dues” or “charge more for conferences,” but we’re very opposed to doing this. Affordability is critical to ELGL.
One idea we’re pursuing is to provide professional services for organizations that buy in to the ELGL way of doing business. Services could include: recruitment, evaluation, communications, public affairs, HR, budget and more. And these services would be provided the ELGL-way – open source, affordable, sharable, broadly communicated, and replicable. If you’re reading this and have a project idea you’d like ELGL to assist you with, drop me an email and we can talk about it and if I can help you.[/vc_column_text][vc_text_separator title=”Venture Firms & Fundraising” color=”green”][vc_column_text]
Another idea we’re actively pursuing is working with foundations and venture capital firms to build a long term, sustainable operating budget. This will give us the foundation from which to apply for project-specific grants for some of our ELGL programs and concepts that qualify.
If you have any connections or recommendations on organizations we should talk to or people who want to invest in organizations that promote good governance – help us out by making that connection for us. It will significantly benefit ELGL’s long term success.[/vc_column_text][vc_text_separator title=”Membership” color=”green”][vc_column_text]
The last item you’ll start seeing a refreshed and renewed focus on is increasing the size of our membership, and also encouraging those of you who LOVE ELGL to upgrade your individual membership to an “All In” membership so more of your colleagues can join. Part of our digital upgrade will make membership sign up and renewal even easier.
And I’ll also be more aggressively communicating the benefits of membership in the next couple of weeks so we can reach the membership goal of getting to 2,500 members by July 1. One great way that you can help with this effort is to share, share, share the posts you’ll see about joining ELGL, and also working with your staff and leadership to have your organization join as an “All In” member.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]