This article is also posted in the UNA-SF Blog.
We had a small but dynamic UNA SF Bay Council of Organizations meeting on Thursday, March 13 at the African American Arts and Culture Complex. There were a dozen or so of us at a single round table. A technical hitch prevented InterMix reminders from going out until the afternoon of March 13th, which was was way too late and at least helps explain the low turnout. For our next meeting, scheduled on Thursday, May 8, we will begin now to bring in new organizations and do our best to alert those who have attended before.
We stuck to our agenda: Vision, Structure, Action. For our Vision section, Matt Duffy of FSG gave us an excellent close-up view of FSG’s Collective Impact (CI) advisory. Collective Impact is a recipe for successfully bringing multiple organizations together to make a difference. FSG investigated many successful movements to see what they had in common and came up with five major elements. The slide show Matt provided is available here CI Slides in pdf format and is worth going through. To really work, Collective Impact needs a funded “backbone” organization to handle the details that otherwise are difficult to arrange. Additionally, it is important that our “common goal” be clearly defined and in some sense measurable. So UNA SF Bay COO is not a perfect candidate — yet. However, we have decided to work with CI and we maintained that decision in our meeting on March 13. We will have to grow into the role. CI will give us the framework to bring together a large and successful UN 70th. Thank you Matt and FSG for your good presentation.
For Structure, we agreed we need to keep it simple for now. We are a project of UNA-SF, and are fine with the Core Collaborators taking the lead. Our mission is to unite the Bay Area in support of UN goals. We need to detail this mission, taking it apart and putting it back together so it is definite and measurable. Membership in the COO for now means an OK from the member organization to post its logo and mission on our website and for the member organization to post our logo on its website. The Core Collaborators need to keep at this discussion. In a very welcome note, the Unitarian Universalist contingent offered to check if we could meet at the UU church at Franklin and Geary. We have since learned this is possible, so our meeting location costs are going to be much reduced and possibly eliminated.
For Action, we discussed the UN 70th. The energy at the table went up a level, as we brainstormed possibilities. We decided based on a letter from Herb Behrstock of UNA East Bay to get a delegation together to visit Charlotte Schulz, who is handling the War Memorial renovation. We will ask if a plaque commemorating the 1945 signing of the UN Charter can be placed on the outside of the building along with a UN flagpole. At the same time we will present our UN 70th plans to her and ask if she would like to help us bring the plans to fruition.
Possibilities that we discussed included: an NGO Conference, a simultaneous historical exhibit by the main public SF library, a UN related tour of the city, bringing in a major speaker such as Kofi Annan and more. At least the library historical exhibit seems very doable, and a West Coast NGO conference would be the crown of our ambitions. Can we interest the UN Department of Public Information (DPI)? Seems a long shot but no harm in looking into it The general strategy will be for each organization to hold its own UN 70th event and also participate in a central celebration at the War Memorial, where UNA-SF already has a reservation for Oct 24, 2015.
Pablo Castro, President of UNA-SF, reminded us that other organizations will be interested on their own: the City of San Francisco, UNA Northern California Division, and possibly UNA-USA. We need to be ready to cooperate. Also, we decided to activate the UN 70th subgroup of our COO listserve. Towards that end we will have a UN 70th COO Committee meeting on March 26 in the early evening, venue TBA – probably either AFSC offices near 9th and Mission or the Unitarian Universalist Church at Franklin and Geary, both in downtown San Francisco.
