On 10/12/12 21:36, Michael Kozakewich wrote:
It's a bit of a fallacy to outline a couple options and tell everyone
those are the only things we can do.
I'm using harsh language, but here's where I'm coming from:
I'm approaching our situation in terms of what I call "hard policies",
such as
* accepting the proposed lease
* doing electrical renovations immediatly to be paid out of reserves
and future revenue
* making a formal, binding change on the obligations of members re pay
and community service (presumably post renovations)
The callout that went out after Saturday's meeting and the ideas you
mentioned are what I think of as "soft policies" -- that is they're not
binding on the membership and there's a speculative and hope based
element to them.
I don't think a broad hard policy option has been missed -- it would
take a lot determine if a completely distinct hard policy could or could
not exist, but its not wrong to imply that another major hard option
hasn't been thought of and probably won't be thought of.
Naturally folks will want to bring up various soft policy options after
first making the larger hard policy choices.
If we accept the lease and don't do the renovations immediately then
folks will come up with all kinds of soft policy ideas to try raise
money to make renovations happen in the future. If we accept the lease
and do renovations immediately then there will be all kinds of soft
policy ideas to try and make sure we can pay down the debt that would
make it happen right away and still have money to spare.
At this point I get the impression that only these two of the four
overall [known] hard options are likely to garner significant support.
Perhaps we'll end up mid-way, a certain amount of capital will have be
raised as a down payment on renovations and then we'll be servicing a
loan on what remains after that.
(this isn't so much a unique option but a blend of the two extremes --
renovations now vs renovations when 100% of capital for them is there)
Basically, what I've shown with my preferences on the four known hard
policy options is concern that we're going to rely on too much soft
policy to get by -- certainly folks will respond to the call out and
take action, myself included, but I just worry about it being enough.
We can focus on gaining money in other ways, like by encouraging donations
for classes we throw and by hosting paid functions.
Fundraising like this is a much more glorious activity when its focused
on a future capital goal where we say once that goal is hit something
nice is aquired out of those efforts.
This was the tone of our original fundraising before we had the space --
to raise enough capital to allow us to go out and get a space.
Its going to be different engaging in fundraising for the purpose of
supporting our ongoing cash out requirements of rent, heat, electricty,
discretionary spending and (if we want renovations ASAP) loan servicing.
Its harder to sustain fundraising when it has the goal of supporting
ongoing operations that never seem to end vs a project goal that has a
real end-point.
Spending a long time deep in "surival mode" can leave pretty bad scars.
Mark
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