WMF Staff Gathering – July 13, 2010
When I was asked to share about developing mature communities, Paul (Rase) reminded me of a book we read together called “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.” It has some guidelines that help you place yourself on your maturity level, and I arrived at adolescent, so I’m probably not the greatest person to share on mature communities, but I can thank Sarah Baldwin for yesterday offering the term “neotony,” which I looked up and it means “juvenilization, the retention by adults in a species of traits previously seen only in juveniles.” As we develop mature communities (I think she used it in a positive way), we can make sure we retain some of our childlikeness.
And also, as we talk about mature communities, Peru, Kolkata, Kathmandu, everybody will have different perspectives on this. As Brian and Rachel were sharing yesterday, they were going through what they are as a community, and I’m sure a lot of this will be redundant…
Another thing I should mention is that in Romania (I’ve learned especially after working with Sierra Leone) there is not such a distance between United States culture and Romanian culture as in other communities. There is a lot of shared history, in comparison to communities in Thailand or Sierra Leone. So as we try to contextualize and forge ahead in developing mature communities, I recognize that it looks different and probably takes a lot longer in different places.
I want to structure this presentation around our vision. Our vision is “We serve Jesus in community among the poorest of the poor.” And so, serving Jesus for us has been central. I can say ever since the beginning of our time in Romania, we have started our day with a devotional, with worship. In the beginning we just asked every person (which began as 2, then 4, 5, 6) and we took turns coming with a morning devotional. We would share, we would pray, we would worship. I think that established us in worship, and I think as we reflect on worship, it actually creates social space. Our activities, our community, flow from worship and flow back to worship. This is what we want for our communities, that they would experience God. The kids, the families, the ladies what we’re befriending, we want them to experience God and be transformed by God. As social space, we are creating a basis for our relationships by coming together in prayer and by coming together in worship. I can say I haven’t experienced anything more powerful than just worshiping together. We think of our relationships and we think of our ethos and we think of our spirituality, our direction, our vision, it comes out of our worshiping together. It comes out of our praying together. We don’t do it anymore where we ask each person to come with a devotional. We have a chapel, which was the result of reading Henri Nouwen’s book Clowning in Rome, where he talks about open spaces. We were in the process of renovating our community center, and we decided then that we needed an open space that is set aside and marked for our time with God. There, as here, our first act of worship is taking off our shoes and sitting together. I come from a real charismatic church (that’s where I became a Christian), and I was used to this high, energized worship. Now I see a lot of times it is just a discipline to be together and to continue to say, “God, we’re here for you.” That’s serving Jesus.
Today our chapel time is not just saying devotionals. I call it “chapel for ADD,” because everyday we do something different, but it’s not really ADD because we have long periods of silence. We have mornings of centering prayer, mornings for lectio divina, mornings for reflections on our lifestyle celebrations, mornings for intercession, mornings for Bible study, things that will continue to build us. But again, our focus point is being together with God.
The next section I’ll get into here is in community, we serve Jesus. In community, we serve among the poorest of the poor. When I first went to Romania, I went as an exchange student from the University of Nebraska – Omaha, and the very first week that I got there, I said to God, “I’m committed to being here until you call me someplace else.” That was really a functional decision for me, because I knew that I wouldn’t commit to learning language and I wouldn’t commit to relationships unless I was committed. I knew that if I was going to go in six months, I wouldn’t invest in relationships. If I was going to go in six months and not come back, I wouldn’t learn the language. So that was foundational for me personally, but I think our community as a whole has held this commitment to learn language, commitment to local culture. It’s not just learning language; we live with Romanian families. Servant teams and staff, initially we highly recommend that our staff lives with local Romanians, because it’s only there they start to learn how Romanians live, how Romanians think, how Romanians wash their clothes and prepare their dinners. We also seek non-Christian families, because it’s easy to get into this Christian evangelical subculture, which has its own pre-conditions of what a missionary should look like. It may work sometimes, but I think it’s much better for our community to be engaging non-Christians in the dominant culture in Romania.
We’ve also from the very beginning made commitments to partnership. Early on as an exchange student and then later I was just partnered with Romanians who were interested in serving kids on the streets, interested in serving children who were abandoned in hospitals with HIV. When I joined Word Made Flesh and came back, we weren’t even intent on establishing Word Made Flesh-Romania, we were intent on serving what was happening there. It was only after these organizations we were partnering with went in different directions that we saw the need to establish Word Made Flesh-Romania. I think that commitment to partnership gave us a basis of developing community together. It wasn’t like I was coming to set up some things and then hand them over, but we were just learning and doing it together from the beginning.
There’s a commitment to identification and a commitment to relocation, so what that looked like for me after a year or so was I moved into an apartment with Lau, who’s still with us in Galati, and we were taking children off the streets into our apartment. We had no idea what we were doing; these kids had been on the streets for years and had addiction issues, violence issues. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it was a learning experience, and God had grace on us and on the kids. But we didn’t have much money then, and I can remember that most of our meals consisted of beans and bread because that was cheap. I remember feeling undernourished and after a few weeks going off to the store and buying this cheap yogurt and ducking around the corner and eating it because I was embarrassed and I didn’t want anybody to see me. Of course today I wouldn’t do that. I think we made mistakes early on that we were sacrificing ourselves to such an extent that we didn’t have the energy to give. I think we had to learn that balance and even let the kids and our friends there speak into what identification, what relocation looks like.
This is all under “we” as community; I’ll talk a little more later about our programs, but I will say that as we began to develop our ministry together, I think early on we were looking to base those on the gifts that we had in our community. Of course we were seeing the children, seeing they needed to be in schools or seeing the families and realizing that we can’t treat this child in isolation from his family, and we were responding to the very practical needs we saw in relationship with them. We also saw that we needed to give what God has gifted us to give. As we developed some art therapy activities, we had a girl Nina who came into the community, and she was gifted in art and is now finishing her masters degree in art therapy. We began organizing our activities around our gifts and personalities and skills, those things organized the activities that we did and gave structure to them. Paul really helped us when he came because he knew a lot about personality tests and how we can develop community better by knowing one another better and by knowing ourselves better. I like that a lot. We hear this a lot, “Know yourself,” this old model of Socrates, which I think in our communities looks different because it means knowing ourselves through the eyes of the other, knowing ourselves in community, not in isolation. Knowing the gifts, knowing the skill sets, knowing the personalities, knowing the particularities of each person and how we can structure our response to the needs around us.
I said that early on we were committed to doing this, developing community, together, but we definitely had divisions in community between Romanians and Americans. That’s been a constant struggle, and I think we’re in a much better, healthier place now, but it took a long way to get where we are. I think the first thing was starting to name our struggles and name our issues – naming the places that divide and then talking about them. One example early on was on salaries. I remember having discussion around this ping-pong table that was turned into our common work table for everything from homework to meals. We sat around the table on benches and it got so tense that people were standing up on the benches and walking across the table to get out of the room. There were heated discussions, and at the same time we got through it. It took a lot; we had lots of different proposals on the table, but we got through it. It took years really.
Recently, in the last few years, I think our community has been struggling with receiving new people – receiving volunteers, receiving servant teams, receiving new staff. I think we’ve gone through the attachment fatigue of people coming and going and we’ve just had to name that. I think John is helping us to do that – to name that and really repent of that and ask God to help us be hospitable and always ready to receive.
We also started off with really bad rhythms; we didn’t really have any concept of rhythm. We had this idea that we had to be really radical and we were gonna save the world, basically. So we were sleeping on the streets with the kids and then doing a full day the next day. When we got our community center, we spent four or five hours doing homework with the kids and visiting families and taking them to the hospital and doing servant team activities and then renovating the community center at the same time. We had weeks and weeks of 70- and 80-hour weeks. It took its toll. It was then that Phileena and others began bringing community care to us. I think the first thing they said was that we needed to have healthy rhythms for this to be sustainable over the long haul. We need to identify the unhealthy patterns that we have and not just say that we’re “doing-it-for-God” but to stop. We started to say a 40-hour workweek is expected and healthy, and we structured our activities and expectations around that. I know that can be arbitrary but we’ve taken it as a guideline.
Another thing that we struggled with early on was not knowing one another’s commitment. I can remember some big decisions that were made and we were working together to make those decisions collectively, but some of the loudest voices changed the directions of the decisions but then a couple months or a year later those loud voices were no longer with us. We saw that we were bearing the burden of decisions that we made as a community but that community was now different. Another thing is that we didn’t know where commitment stood and we didn’t know what we could expect from one another; there was also kind of a culture of fear. I think we have a lot of people that aren’t intentional about conflict in our community. One of the things that inhibited people from confrontation was the fear that “If I do confront, if I do address this issue, then this person will leave our community.” That wasn’t the reason, but it was one of the consequences that was positive from covenanting. We said early on that we didn’t want our relationships to be based on contracts but on relational covenant, mutual commitments to one another. We’re going to talk more about this later in the week, but a real consequence that was tangible within days of starting covenants for us was a culture of stability, a culture of confidence that we can address these things. With the U.S. staff we knew that we were on a contract but with our Romanian staff it was an unlimited term; after we started covenanting we knew that “I have to deal with this because I’m gonna be with these people for at least another three years.” It was a motivation for us to start being intentional in relationships and embracing our spiritual disciplines. Recently Paul has initiated monthly covenant meetings, meetings with those in our community that have committed to covenant. It’s been a real healthy platform for a lot of discussions that have the capacity to be really sensitive and highly charged. That’s helping us as we seek stability and confidence in relationship.
We started early on just going out on the streets with a soccer ball and when we had money buying sandwiches and building relationships with the kids. Gradually people started to join. We prayed for a year that God would send the right people and I can remember knowing some of the people in our community like Vali – we prayed for Vali for a year before she came into our community. As we started to see God calling and rising up people and as our community started to grow, we couldn’t be as flexible and it wasn’t just one or two people doing everything, but we started to delegate and to define roles and responsibilities. I think that created more sense of ownership, and something else that’s linked to this is how we’ve been doing decision-making. Those that bear the burden of the decision have the most weight in making that decision. So, those that are working with younger kids, if it’s a decision concern them, have the most weight in that decision. If it’s a decision about administration, it’s Bela; as our director of administration, he has the most weight in that because he will shoulder it at the end of the day.
Also as we’ve grown and have had new people come in, we’ve seen the importance of telling our story, the history of our community. I think again, as I said last night, that’s given people an idea and perspective of how God has led us in the past and some idea of direction for the future. We don’t want to be fragmented and start over every time we have new people come into our community even though our community will look very different with those people.
We used to just pray that God would raise up people and when they came they would do a volunteer time with us, and that’s still something that we practice today. We didn’t want people to come just for a job to work with us; we didn’t want people to come without that calling. For some people, the time of volunteering has been over a year; for other people, it’s a few weeks or a month. It’s a time when we together can discern vocation and make sure it’s a good fit before we invest in more training, more commitment to one another, and the delegation of responsibilities. Another thing is that as we grow we see needs in our community; we see that we need somebody to help us do social work with the families and be more of a presence there. As we see those needs, we haven’t just received anybody that’s come but we’re starting to look for people with particular skills, particular personalities, particular gifts, praying that God would raise up those people. That’s given us somewhat of a criteria for selecting new staff and recruiting volunteers.
Again, we serve Jesus among the poorest of the poor. This “we” isn’t just us, but there’s a broader community that’s supporting us, and we have to be intentional about building that broader community. God has been gracious to us; He’s given us relationships with people from the UK, people that visit us and see the kids and see what we’re doing who have become connected with us and started to get involved. We see that these relationships with people outside our community are essential for our success and sustainability. It takes a long time; friendships don’t come easy, and they aren’t formed in a short period of time. With our staff, I can see a relationship between how well people do and how healthy their relationships are outside the community. So, we want people to develop relationships outside the community, also to kind of resist the expat culture. That’s easy to get into; there are NGOs everywhere and maybe we have more affinity there, but most of those people don’t stay and most of those people don’t understand local culture. Seeking to develop relationships with people from Galati has been a key value for us – and also with the local churches.
Early on I made the conscious decision not to speak in churches because there are so many missionaries that come through, and that’s the position of power. They come and speak and then they go. That’s fine and I think that’s helpful, but we didn’t want to take that position of power. We came in and developed relationships. Like for me it started in one church, but that church said, “If you come with the kids off the street, sit in the back, not the front.” So I went to another church; there the old church ladies would flick the kids in the back of the ear when they were talking in church, so we went to another church. Eventually I settled in one church and we’ve maintained relationships with all of these churches, but it’s been a commitment. Even now over the last few months there’s been a struggle with one particular church. We said that we are tenaciously committed to the local church until they exclude us, but we won’t exclude them. We can’t do this apart from them. When I meet with local church leaders, I tell them that this doesn’t make sense without them; our ministry doesn’t make sense without the local church, without the participation of the local church.
We’ve also been working as we developed our local organization to maintain and develop partnerships with other organizations. I sit on the board of another NGO in Galati, and I’ll tell you that there is a lot of competition among the NGOS, a lot of competition for funds and resources – for grants, for donors, for meeting with business leaders. We have said we’re not going to engage in competition; we won’t participate in it, we’ll withdraw from it. I think that has created some trust with us with other local organizations.
We’ve tried also to participate in some of these national federations. I think that’s a good idea because in Romania they’re making lots of legislation on issues like community centers and childcare and things like this. We will be affected by it, but we can also have a voice in it. Not only is it important to look at partnerships in your local community but also nationally and even at the international level. I think that this is something that we’re more open to since Romania has been in the European Union. I’ll just read this verse from Ecclesiastes 11:1, which I think is a good image of how we should be thinking about building broader communities, not only in our local areas, not only in our churches back home, but beyond – “Cast your bread on many waters for after many days you will get it back.” We don’t cast it so that it comes back but we see that it does come back. April started telling some of the stories of our kids to her nephews and all of the sudden other parents wanted these stories. I think that’s an example of casting bread and all of a sudden many, many people find life from it. I wrote a prayer letter a few months ago on the situation in Romania, and I don’t know how this person in Belgium got hold of it, but they are using it to do an advocacy project for the situation in Romania from Belgium. Seeing beyond ourselves is important.
Serving Jesus in community among the poor. Thinking about what serving among the poor looks like, we have had to identify our local vision. We did this the first time in 1999 after being there for some time – seeing where God was leading us, what were the relationships that we had. We didn’t come in with a vision – like John (Koon) said, “We didn’t come into Moldova with a vision of this is what we’re going to do” – but in relationship, seeing where God is leading us, and then naming that vision. As simple and straightforward as possible, naming that vision. Early on it was real exciting because there’s a lot of freedom in dreaming. Sierra Leone has been in this position this last year where there is a community center all of a sudden and there are all these options, and I think that there’s a freedom to dream, a freedom to think beyond what we can ever do. As Sarah (Lance) says, “Dream for things you’ll never see.” I think that’s a great place to start and open up our imaginations. And then we become realistic and start to see what are the impediments, what are the things that are obstacles to us realizing that vision, and out of that we start to develop some of our activities. Once we get beyond naming our vision, it does entail a commitment and intentionality and participation by every person in the community.
As we develop activities, it’s about keeping the relationships in the center. I think this is a great short evaluation of our activities – is this serving relationships? is this serving the kids? After a time, some activities might not, and it might be time to cut them of we’re just serving activities and not relationships. You’ve probably heard this explanation of how an organization is run: sometimes they start as a movement, and then they become a machine, and then they become a monument. I think if we are intentional on keeping our organizations movements then we have to keep relationships in the center, we have to keep people in the center. And I think we have to allow our organizations to develop organically. Like I said, when we started in Romania, we didn’t have any solutions, we didn’t know any solutions. It was only after living with these kids in an apartment for a few months that we began to see and learn how we can do life together. Sleeping on the streets, helping some of the children’s homes get started, creating a drop-in center that was a place where the kids could drop in and have a meal and take a shower, then we started to focus on meeting with their families, meeting with their parents, seeing if we can try to bridge this divide between the kids on the streets and their homes. Out of that we saw that we needed to do a community center, and it’s been about getting kids back into school, helping them stay off the streets, identifying the kids that are coming onto the streets and begging. We developed a garden project and saw how that can be therapeutic and instructive. In 2002 or 2003 we had a fantastic training; we’ve been to lots of trainings in Romania, but most of them weren’t that helpful, but there was one on attachment disorders and the response to attachment disorders. This for us was just amazing because we saw that we could structure all of our activities around creating healthy attachments between the parents and their kids. Later on we had some people from the states come and talk to us about addictive behaviors, and that changed everything we were doing with the kids on the streets. This is an example of maybe how we saw our activities not serving the kids; at that point, we saw that our activities were actually enabling the kids to stay on the streets because we were basically mending their wounds and giving them meals so they could live better on the streets, and there was less motivation to leave. Basically we told the kids that we would help them to take steps to face their addictions but try to modify an AA-like 12-step program that’s possible for them to do, though most of them can’t read. It changed all of our activities with the kids on the streets. We’ve introduced play therapy recently. April and Lenuta are getting training in this, and we see amazing potential for it. All of our methodology has come out of our experience and our relationships with the kids, and again, we’re trying to keep with the kids in the center. With our kids on the streets, they get a little bit upset because we tell them we’re praying for them to get sick because what we’ve seen is that one of the kids that was on the street for fifteen years suddenly was paralyzed and couldn’t walk. He was in the hospital for over six months and it was during that time that he had enough time off the streets to get some space from the glue that he was sniffing and he hasn’t gone back. Another kid got tuberculosis and the same thing – off the street for over six months and didn’t go back to the streets. Again, the kids know that we care for them, love them, and we try to stay in relationship with them, but we’ve changed our way of helping them.
With programming, we have lots of activities with the kids. Our first servant team, as they were learning Romanian, they were teaching our kids Romanian – how to read and write and how to do mathematics, even though they themselves were just learning Romanian. We were doing all of this together. After we’d finished the programs and activities with the kids, we’d go and try to do the accounting for the day – what we’d spent on food. There was a time for me and others in the community when I had to say I can either do this all day or I can support others in our community and our staff. That’s a hard decision, but I could see how we could help more kids by doing that. That was also when in the office we started to structure things around administration, community care, and advocacy. Having those tools and that structure was helpful for us – a healthy institution that would serve the movement. With administration, it wasn’t just accounting and all the finances, but it’s the accountability and the ability to show others, the transparency for them to see who we are. That was and is a huge issue in Romania. In the ’90s, thousands of NGOs were registered. Most of them did nothing; many of them were fronts for illegal activities, and so all NGOs were seen negatively. For us to commit to the long haul of accountability and transparency, it’s given us a lot of credibility. Now I think when organizations and state institutions see us, there’s trust. We also have Bela, who’s an expert in law, and so he helps us lead the way through.
We’ve created policies and procedures. I admit that most of our policies and procedures were reactive to problems, issues, and needs that we’ve had, but some of them have been proactive. We have a manual of procedures that everybody has access to so they can see it. We’ve divided them up into administration, programming, community care, finance. What we’ve really sought to do is see our policies and procedures integrated, not to have separate policies for the US staff and the Romanian staff, though there are different legal requirements that we have to take into consideration. For me, I didn’t really move forward with a sabbatical application until I knew there was a sabbatical policy in place for our Romanian staff because I couldn’t take sabbatical unless I knew there was sabbatical for Lau and Vale, because they’ve been working as long as I have, and Bela the same.
With administration, there’s also been a need to be professional and competent. Early on we didn’t have a lot of competency, I would say; we had a lot of compassion and a lot of good intentions, but we’ve seen the need to develop competency over time. That’s something that doesn’t end but needs to continue to be developed.
One other thing I would put in here with administration is being aware of the risks. There are always legal obligations and we have to try to figure out how we can meet those. A few years ago we smuggles back, Bela and I, thousands of dollars of anti-retrovirals from India. If we had gotten caught, we probably would have had problems, and our organization would have had problems. We had kids dying at that time because their treatments were being interrupted, and so we thought whatever risk is worth it. But today we have a much larger community, our organization is much more established, there are lots of kids that could be potentially impacted by that. That has to be considered along these legal structures – what’s the risk – when we make some of these decisions.
We look at sustainability. The Bolivia community has been great from what I’ve heard of how they came into Bolivia and researched and saw what was happening and then made their decisions of how to move forward. John’s (Koon) also done some of that. I know in Kolkata it was a long time of praying and meeting with the ladies and out of that the vision and the activities were birthed. Healthy contextualization – when we are spending time in this place and asking God how we can serve Jesus together among the poor, how that can be contextualized; taking the time to pray that and research that leads to sustainability.
We have this conversation, this tension, in our community between faith and planning, especially when it comes to financial sustainability. We have people who have the gift of faith, and they say God will provide; we have others who say “This is what we have now, what can we plan based on that?” I think that’s a healthy tension. I got a great e-mail from Brian (Langley) a few weeks ago, and he was just encouraging me that whenever we move forward, whenever we’ve made these decisions, God has provided and there is enough. Some of us who worry and tend to have sleepless nights about “where is this going to come from so that we don’t have to lay off workers or stop programs,” we need to root ourselves in God, what He has done in the past and what He will do to take us forward – ultimately saying that it’s His, not ours; it’s God’s activity, not ours.
I think planning should also be in that. Tom Sine says, in his book Mustard Seed vs. Big World (he’s a futurist, so he looks at trends), “If we don’t organize ourselves differently in the West, we won’t be able to sustain the same amount of mission in the future.” Being aware of some of these things, I don’t think it necessarily limits us, but it should motivate us to be creative in how we seek sustainability. When we talk about sustainability, of course we don’t just talk about financial sustainability, but a broad support base, including emotional sustainability and program sustainability.
With advocacy – advocacy for us has been the last thing that we do when we have time. I’m not saying that’s the way to do it; I see lots of advantages from the advocacy that we’ve done, but it’s been about what, at the end of the day, we have energy to do. It’s paid off for us, especially with the churches in Galati. A few years ago we started a publication that we call “Chains of Poverty;” we identify a poverty issue in each of the newsletters. We try to help the church to think through it differently. We’ve talked about alcoholism in one, racism in one, integration into the EU in one, homelessness, parenting – we’re trying to challenge some of the assumptions in the church to help them have a better understanding because we ultimately want the kids and the families that we’re working with to be integrated into the local church. We do a separate newsletter twice a year, and at the end of the year we put them together so that they can serve as an annual report of activities. We try to make them informative, and we try to avoid “church-y” language so that people that aren’t in the church – businesses and state institutions – can read that and find out about us and know us.
We’ve also done presentations in the churches. I said that I didn’t go and impose myself on the pulpit when I first went there, but as we’ve developed relationships with the churches, they’ve invited us to come and give presentations. Often times our kids will sing. We want to help the church; we say we want to reconcile the local church with the poor. We want the church to be aware, and it’s there that most of our volunteers and most of our staff have come from.
We’ve also started to see local fundraising pay off. Every year we have a little bit more, whether it’s from government subsidies that we can access. We ask and encourage each of our staff to be involved, to participate in fundraising; we don’t want this to be one person’s activity, but we see it as a collective. We’re also asking our Romanian staff to be involved in raising their own personal support for their salaries and taxes and other activities. The local church has responded; we have faithful givers – like an old guy giving us 10% of his pension, which is huge, because his pension is so small. Also, other businesses in the area have supported us consistently. We have had options to apply for grants, and up till now we haven’t. We went through the process one time, and I’ve helped other organizations I’m involved with apply for grants, but we haven’t done it as a community. I think this might be helpful – a lot of times the grants want you to do something, and we’ve said “We don’t want to get funding that doesn’t serve our vision; we don’t want to change our vision in order to get the funding, but we want to seek funding opportunities that will serve the vision.” That’s been our guideline, and it’s saved us a lot. I’m thankful that we haven’t developed in such a way that we are dependent on grants. We are dependent on people that are connected to us relationally.
When we founded our local organization in 2001 (Bela was really helpful because he knew the legislation), we were a bit different. In Romania to be on a board of directors meant a place of authority, a place of power – very top-down and hierarchical. We were really cautious early on when we started to seek people out for our board of directors, so we got Lenuta to be our chair. We had a couple others who we were involved with for years and years that we trusted, but all this was new to them, and we don’t interact with them on a daily basis, so having them have any type of power was a little bit scary for us. For us, it’s meant developing our board, and it’s taken years. I feel like now we have a pretty good board and we’re going in a good direction. I’ll give you an example. We had a discussion on ecumenicity at our church a few weeks ago. We’re in this context where the orthodox exclude evangelicals, and the evangelicals exclude the orthodox, and the Catholics are kind of somewhere in the midst. Our board chair is on the elders’ board of this church, and when the discussion came up about how “we can’t have any interaction with people that are not in our church,” he said “We’re not exclusive” (this is a Pentecostal church), and he brought up these really great points, and everyone else just kind of hushed, and that was it, we went on. I was really encouraged that our board was speaking up for us and championing us. That is something that is starting to happen.
There is always accountability and an outside perspective on our board, when we’ve set salaries or made decisions that affect us, they’re able to give outside advice and a different perspective. It does mean a lot work on our part in order to develop them to lead us. It took and is taking a long time. Initially I served as the executive director, and then another person took that role on but then backed out of it; we’ve had a real hard time finding somebody to serve in that role. What we’ve done is to divide those responsibilities over an executive team; I don’t think it’s necessarily the best way, but it’s working for us right now. Again, trying to respond to what’s in front of us and being creative with what’s in front of us.
Another thing that I would add into this is evaluation. Evaluation has been big for us, and we’ve done it basically from the beginning. It hasn’t always been helpful. Sometimes our evaluations were so vague that it was great because everyone got a voice and a perspective, and they got to think through and evaluate themselves, and that process was good, but then we had so many things that came out of it that we didn’t know what to implement. A lot of times it just got shelved, and things really didn’t change. As we’ve been able to do specific evaluations, for instance of a board meeting or a retreat, then we’ve had real specific things we can do in response to those things.
A culture of evaluation, I think, is healthy. God, in the creation story, He acts, and then He reflects, and He says, “This is good” or “This is not good.” It’s this acting, looking at it as good or not good, evaluating it, and seeing what we need to change. We early on were getting down on our knees to talk to kids and embracing them because they didn’t have parents, only to find out that we were furthering their attachment disorder. So we changed our approach; we saw that they needed strong adults that impose limits. This culture of evaluation has been important; it’s a value.
As we’ve become more defined in roles and responsibilities and activities, we sometimes get in these little compartments, and we can see how it affects us. A challenge for us today is being able to have a big picture of our community. The fact that eight people have left our community in the last year has helped us to consolidate, but it’s also made us step back and get a big picture of who we are and helped us make decisions based on how they affect the whole.
This is what I’ll conclude with – our development over time. In a way, it was easy to start something, to get people going; it was new, it was exciting. We needed people; people saw that they could do something and they got on board. But after ten years, it’s different. We in Romania in our community are at a stage of re-imagining and re-envisioning where we’re to go from here. It’s about nurturing, constantly developing, maintaining vision. It’s a new day for us, and I think there are new challenges because of that.
Those are some short reflections.