Board of Director's and Mr. Wal-Mart

There is a lot of paperwork involved in running a non-profit organization... a lot of of reports, letters, proposals, and more reports on progress of those previous reports, letters and proposals.  I got to attend the RCS monthly board meeting recently, which was a neat way to go behind the scenes of the group.  The oddest part of the meeting was that we met at the Wal-Mart distribution center!  They switch up the meeting location each month so that the same members are not having to travel the same distance every time.  This one was about a 40 min drive out of Charlottesville, closer to a few of the board members homes.

It was such a strange juxtaposition to be at the meeting of an environmental group working to preserve a local river, surrounded by these weird pictures of Sam Walton (Wal-Mart founder) all around the conference room...
Thank you, Sam.  I trust you and your advice on success.



One of the board members works at the distribution center, so he signed up to use the conference room for the evening.  It is a distribution center, so there were a lot of interfering sounds coming from the warehouse throughout the evening.
The meeting was pretty interesting to observe.  It was fairly formal, following the normal structure of such meetings:  old business, new business, budget report, executive director's report.  One of the big topics of discussion was an appeal letter for hopefully Major Donors.  This has apparently been a topic of discussion for many months, and the hope was to finally settle on the wording of the letter.  It was pretty funny to watch the Exec Dir handle the discussion so similarly to how we handle a lot of situations at Patagonia... the customer is always right!  Our reality is not always their reality, so we can end up talking in circles a lot!  One board member had a very strong feeling for including a dollar amount in the letter, just to make it a clear invitation to donate.   By the end of the discussion the same board member suggested not including a dollar amount, just to make it clear because as board members, they would be the ones signing a lot of these letters to acquaintances.  The Exec Dir. handled it all so well, especially watching the conversation go in a complete circle from the same board member!  It was funny.  I think we ended up coming to a decision, and will be getting those letters finalized and printed this week!
RCS is a lot like running the store.  You have to communicate with a lot of different people, like we do with corporate, regional managers, the Reno distribution center... and you have to keep your donors and board of directors happy, just like we do with our customers.
We got a little bit of rain this week, which will help the water levels for anyone out for a paddle on the river.  RCS has a big event on October 18, the Rivanna River Sojourn, so we're keeping fingers crossed for more rain so that it's more of a paddle than a wet hike!