Membership Policy Working Group
August 10, 2004 - minutes
Present: Jane Ward, Corey Simpson, Mary Whetsell, Chris Tamdjidi
Not Present: Susan Wagner, Wendy Layton, Francesca Nilo, Candia Ludy, Fernando Allyon
Next Meetings:
Tuesday, August 31
Tuesday, September 7
Tuesday, September 21
Tuesday, October 5
All meetings will be held at the same time of day, with the same dial-in number and access code:
9am Mountain, 10am Central, 11am Eastern, noon Atlantic, 4pm BST, 5pm CEST.
Dial in #: 1-831-600-1000. Access code: 1110811
FEEDBACK REQUESTED FROM ALL WORKING GROUP MEMBERS
A document was emailed to all working group members on 8/7/04 that will serve as our beginning point for policy development. Feedback regarding this document was requested from all members who could not attend the phone conference. If you were not on the phone conference and have not provided feedback, please either email Mary with your thoughts or call her at 205-595-8568.
MANDALA GOVERNING COUNCIL MEETING
Work generated by the membership working group was well received at this meeting in late July at Shambhala Mountain, and we are encouraged to keep moving forward.
SHAMBHALA CONGRESS WEBSITE
All working group members are encouraged to track items being posted on the Shambhala Congress website. The quality of work being posted there is truly inspiring and knowing about what other working groups are doing will inform our efforts.
TIMETABLE
We are now in phase 2 of developing recommendations for a unified mandala-wide membership policy. Having completed the “findings” phase, from now until early November, we will develop membership policy recommendations. These recommendations will be presented to President Reoch and the chairpersons of the working groups at a meeting in early December. From there, they will be distributed to all Centers so that they can be discussed prior to Shambhala Congress ’05.
DEFINITION OF MEMBERSHIP
Most of the meeting was spent discussing the proposed definition of membership as presented in the draft document emailed to all on 8/7. All on the call seemed to agree on the basic view expressed by the proposed definition; many suggestions were made regarding working with language of the definition more precisely. Mary will integrate the suggestions that were made, revise this definition, and email it to all WG members for further feedback.