Membership Policy Working Group

November 2, 2004 - minutes

Present: Jane Ward, Richard Reoch, Mary Whetsell

Next Meeting:    To be announced.                  

1.Confusion regarding call-in time seems to have made this a sparsely attended meeting, but it was nevertheless quite productive. The meeting was devoted to final revisions of our recommendation document:

The cover page of the document will consist of a summary of “what’s new” and “what’s the same” regarding membership policy.

The view section will be reworked to include the view of community as a practice vehicle, and how community can become magnetizing. We agreed to emphasize the notion of magnetizing new members in favor of membership as mandatory or obligatory.

President Reoch suggested we try to make our wording “more like life and less like school” – therefore some reworking of certain words – student, Path, etc.

2. Mary and The Pres will do the preliminary rewriting. Once that is completed, the draft #6 will go out to the Membership Working Group and to the Mandala Governing Council for review.  Following the Boston meeting of the MGC in early December, the document will be released to the mandala-at-large via posting on the Congress website.

3. We will schedule a “where do we go from here?” meeting for mid-December. If any really huge changes get suggested or important issues come up before then, Mary will schedule an interim meeting sooner. Working group members should receive draft #6 in the near future – your only immediate job is to give that document one final go-over, and to email Mary with any comments or suggestions.

Cheers to everyone!