by Nelle Moffett
Since our last update in July, the Board has held our annual election of officers. I have the privilege of remaining president until my term on the Board ends next year. Our newest Board member, Bill Gayner, bravely agreed to be elected Vice President. We are grateful that Darryl Commings will serve another term as our Treasurer.
Darryl and our Executive Director, Catherine Torpey, arranged for our financial auditor to come to our September meeting in order to present our annual audit to us. I asked her, “What is your overall assessment of our books?” and I was delighted when she responded with: “They are immaculate.” We owe a big thank you not only to Darryl and Catherine for that, but most especially to Elizabeth Cantor and Rita Kirsch, our two staff members who enter information into our accounts with such care and precision. Our bookkeeper comes every two weeks to reconcile the accounts, and then our auditor checks the books each year, and another accountant creates the documents which we have to send to the US tax office (the IRS). We are blessed indeed to have such fine people caring for the Institute’s financial health.
We also reviewed the Portfolio assignments of our Board members. Portfolios are a way for individual members of the Board to be connected to some aspect of TIFI’s operations. Usually having a portfolio means either attending a committee meeting, or meeting individually with Catherine. The portfolios this year are: Gendlin Center (Evelyn Fendler-Lee), Membership (Tom Larkin), Goodwill (Bill Gayner), Finances/Treasury (Darryl Commings), Nominating (Flor Sassoli), and liaison to the International Leadership Council (Eveline Moor Züllig). My portfolio is governance, as well as Intellectual Property.
We have tried a new experiment which is working out very nicely for us so far. We have a volunteer, not a member of the Board, who attends our meetings to take notes. Ilse Pieth has studied Focusing with Eveline Moor Züllig for many years, and she agreed to volunteer to attend meetings for the sole purpose of taking minutes. This allows all the Board members to be fully present without any one of us having to worry about this task – which can be much more difficult than it seems! We are immensely grateful to Ilse for doing this service for TIFI.
Each month, we set aside the beginning of each Board meeting to greet new Coordinators. This is always a wonderful way to begin our meetings, and we are so impressed by the wonderful folks from all over the world who are carrying Focusing forward.
The end of each meeting, we make sure to set aside time to look at the big, strategic questions. Over the last couple of months, Board member Evelyn Fendler-Lee has been working with Catherine to suggest to us revisions of the Goals of TIFI. The current set of goals, which can be found at focusing.org/mission, were carefully constructed by the Board and the International Leadership Council over a two-year process from 2015 to 2017. They have held up very well, but we are exploring whether the Institute would benefit from revising them to capture where we are now.
You can always keep up with us by reading about us, reading minutes of our meetings, and seeing other relevant documents on our web page at focusing.org/board.
Thank you as always to all of you who are members of TIFI, or who make donations, participate in our programs or who volunteer. I continue to be amazed at the exciting variety of learning that you make available through your offerings in our Focusing Highlights series, our conferences, and in so many other ways.