Starting the Year Off Right

Every January, TTGM hosts a Planning session that is open to the public. This is the time we get to stop for a moment, celebrate our accomplishments from the previous year, create a vision for the current year, and start making plans to make that happen.

This is an all-day event–starting with breakfast at 8AM, and going through lunch into mid-afternoon. We invite all our current members and everyone in the community to join us. It’s a big commitment, giving up your Saturday to brainstorm projects to benefit the community, but we manage to get 35-50 dedicated attendees.

Having an annual planning session helps us regroup and take stock of where we are, where we’re headed, what do we need to get there. We get to pride ourselves for what we accomplished last year (always astonishes us!), share a meal together, and dream big about our community’s future and how we can impact it. Inviting the community allows them to see how we function, what makes us work so well together, and gives us ideas for collaboration. Everyone gets pretty pumped by the day’s activities and it gets our year off to a great start.

How It Works

We start with a grounding meditation to get everyone present and focused. Then we give an”Intro to Transition” and a Year-In-Review which gets everyone up to speed with what we’ve been up to and why we do it. We add some kind of activity to get the creative juices flowing. Ideas get written up on sheets of paper and we break for lunch. Lunch is a chance to get to know each other better and discuss projects we might take on.

After lunch, we work through what ideas resonate the most and whittle it all down to a doable number of projects. Then, it’s time to commit. Each person gets 5 stickies—2 yellow ones to indicate a leader role, 3 green to indicate an active participant. We limit it to that number so no one over-commits. You can have as many blue stickies as you like, indicating an interest, but not a commitment.

Everyone adds their stickies to the appropriate project. If a project has at least one leader and two other committed participants, we consider it a viable initiative. Then, we celebrate our work together, clean up, and close the day. The organizers send each team the contact info for its members and a suggested template for the first meeting, reminding the leaders to call a meeting within two weeks.

Outcomes

Over the years, we’ve streamlined the process and usually manage to end around 2PM, with a number of current and new initiatives organized into enthusiastic teams. It’s a very organic process, with some older projects having run their course, some new ones not catching on, but the end result is a dozen or more teams that see a chance to make a difference in our community and have the support to see it happen! Come join us next January!

 Click Here to view the Annual Planning post archive.