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Long range and strategic planning
Getting the MOST out of your planning process
Sometimes board members feel somewhat resistant to engaging in a strategic planning process. It may seem like a lot of abstract talk with little practical value. Maybe no one is sure how to get started, and the discussion wanders around with no real conclusions. The good news is that there are some straightforward and sensible steps the board can follow to arrive at a plan that actually translates into useful action. One of those sets of steps is MOST: Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.
Sometimes board members feel somewhat resistant to engaging in a strategic planning process. It may seem like a lot of abstract talk with little practical value. Maybe no one is sure how to get started, and the discussion wanders around with no real conclusions. The good news is that there are some straightforward and sensible steps the board can follow to arrive at a plan that actually translates into useful action. One of those sets of steps is MOST: Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.
Mission
Articulating your mission
Before you can get started fulfilling your mission, you need to know exactly what that is. Having a well-written, focused mission statement is an important part of decisionmaking, keeping everyone headed the same direction and making sure that all the resources you expend go toward achieving your goal. It might seem that you could skip this step because your mission is obvious; you’re a Zen center, after all. You’re here to help people practice. But in the West, there are all kinds of Zen centers with all kinds of priorities and practice visions. Without a clear and specific sense of purpose, it’s easy to get pulled in several directions at once when a community organization calls to see whether you’ll co-sponsor a hot-rod race, a board member wants to invite a political candidate to give a lecture, and one of the doans thinks you should create a page of original limericks on your website. When the board of directors begins work on the mission statement, it will immediately become apparent that every person has a different idea of what this organization is about – and where it should put its resources.
Your mission also gives your center consistency over time. Individual leaders will come and go, but the center can go on with stability and focus if the next generation of practitioners understands what it was designed to achieve. It’s true that you may adjust your mission as time goes by and needs change, but having a mission ensures these changes will happen intentionally rather than as the result of disconnection and assumptions. Giving board members a sense of the organization’s history as part of their orientation helps them understand the legacy they’ve inherited from the leaders before them.
You may find that as you discuss the mission, a variety of other issues will come up. Set up a “parking lot” for ideas, questions and concerns that may not be directly related to the conversation at hand but are important to address before things can go forward. This can take the form of a white board, a flip chart, a projected computer screen, or anything workable to which a facilitator can add items and which everyone can see. Make sure you come back to these parked items periodically so nothing slips through the cracks and creates a problem down the road.
You may also find that you have to put aside the discussion of the mission in order to get clarity about larger underlying expectations, perceptions and assumptions. You may see some of your parked items coalesce into an underlying theme that needs attention. If it becomes clear that a few board members assume that you will be offering a traditional Soto Zen practice calendar, while a few more are under the impression that the center is not tied to any particular Buddhist denomination, and the remaining folks take it for granted that any and all varieties of meditation, religious or secular, will be taught at your center, it may be time to stop thinking about the mission statement itself for a little while and have a candid conversation about the practice approach your organization will take and why it exists.
The SWOT analysis
You might have an idea about the focus you’d like the new center to have, or you may have only a general feeling about its purpose. By looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, you’ll uncover the unique contribution your center can make in the world of Zen practice. You’ll be making note of your potential participants’ unmet needs and matching them to the skills, abilities and interests of the center’s leadership. You’ll also be considering the particular challenges you’ll face either because of resources not available in your own sangha or because of the external environment.
Strengths and weakness are internal to your center. Ask yourself: What are the characteristics of our center that will help us to help others to awaken? What skills, experience, tangible and intangible resources, and advantages does our center have that put it in a unique position to enable practice? Then look at the other side. What are the characteristics of our organization that are going to get in the way of our ability to make practice available? What skills, experience, tangible and intangible resources are we missing?
Next, look outside of the center itself at the environment in which it operates to assess opportunities and threats. What conditions exist in society, the community, the universe of Zen practice or in the world at large that are going to help us work toward liberation? What conditions are going to be challenging to us? Answering these questions may require a little research. You’ll need to stay informed about what’s going on in the denomination, what kinds of Buddhist practice are available in your city or state, and perhaps even the activities of nearby churches or relevant nonprofits. Where are your potential participants putting their time, funds and attention these days? All of these things can affect the way you carry out your mission.
Make a list of these strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. Don’t take time now to work out ways of resolving deficits or meeting challenges. Instead, look for patterns that might suggest where your center could be most effective, based on what your people are most skilled at doing, what resources are in place now or could be easily acquired, opportunities created by the way things are in the world at the moment, and any other advantages you perceive in your current situation. Think about unmet needs that your center can fill, things you can make available that would be otherwise unavailable in your area. If your clergy are particularly well-trained in a certain aspect of practice, that might be a good focus. Maybe you have access to a facility that’s ideal for a specific kind of activity, like sesshin or children’s practice. Perhaps your center is in a college town, where zazen practice would provide a good balance for academics. What will give your center a unique market position?
Use the weaknesses and threats to discern what kind of focus might be ill-advised at this time, and what sort of initiatives will take extra resources. Even though a particular kind of activity seems to be contraindicated by your SWOT analysis, your board may still feel that it’s worthwhile and want to pursue it, especially if directors are interested in breaking new ground of some kind or piloting an innovative approach to practice. Just be aware that it may not be easy to get those initiatives off the ground with this challenging focus, and it may take plenty of time and resources.
To write your mission statement, you’ll need to know three things: the goal of the services you provide, what those services are, and who’s using them. These three things are interconnected, and although we’ll discuss them here in a linear way, board discussion will likely move back and forth among them.
Using the information you’ve uncovered in the SWOT analysis, draft a goal for your center’s practice offerings. Don’t worry yet about what the program looks like or what elements it should include. Just consider what you would like to see happen as a result of people’s participation. How will their lives and practice change? What will they be able to do? What will they gain from practicing with you? What are the effects on the larger community?
Think carefully about the people your center will serve. That may sound like a waste of time. It’s a Soto Zen center. It serves practitioners. There. Done. Next! But are you really setting out to serve all practitioners? In all walks of life? In every stage of their training? Anywhere in the world? If many of your members are retirees, children’s practice may not be a high priority at your center. However, if your center’s neighborhood is filled with young families, then children’s practice becomes more important. If your center is a startup in a city in which practice has been unavailable up to now, your members will need a significant amount of basic religious education – something an established sangha might do less often in favor of providing opportunities for more experienced practitioners. Will you be providing professional training to novices, or concentrating mainly on working with the laity? Where are your members likely to come from? Maybe your center is the only one for miles around, and seeks to serve those who may be practicing on their own without a teacher but live too far away to attend regularly in person. That might change the way you develop and deliver your activities. The more you know about your members, the more skillful your means can be – in other words, the better you can tailor your activities and focus your valuable resources on meeting their specific needs. A broad, vague mission is less likely to result in the kind of transformation that lies at the heart of our practice.
Now consider what it will take to reach your goals. In general, what kind of resources will your center need to offer in order for participants to receive the benefits you’ve outlined? Don’t just list off all the practice activities you can think of. Concentrate on developing a coherent set of activities and resources in which each and every element is directly related to the goal you’ve written, and arises directly from the needs of the specific people you will serve. Other ideas may seem fun and interesting, but if they don’t move you toward your goal, they will take valuable resources from your mission and cause you to veer off in an unrelated direction. Resist the urge to justify these unrelated activities by inflating their importance as fundraisers or convincing yourself they will bring more first-time visitors to the center. If they don’t fit, they just don’t.
Having come to some basic agreement on these three elements—goal, services and recipients—you’re ready to begin drafting a mission statement. It might look something like this:
Before you can get started fulfilling your mission, you need to know exactly what that is. Having a well-written, focused mission statement is an important part of decisionmaking, keeping everyone headed the same direction and making sure that all the resources you expend go toward achieving your goal. It might seem that you could skip this step because your mission is obvious; you’re a Zen center, after all. You’re here to help people practice. But in the West, there are all kinds of Zen centers with all kinds of priorities and practice visions. Without a clear and specific sense of purpose, it’s easy to get pulled in several directions at once when a community organization calls to see whether you’ll co-sponsor a hot-rod race, a board member wants to invite a political candidate to give a lecture, and one of the doans thinks you should create a page of original limericks on your website. When the board of directors begins work on the mission statement, it will immediately become apparent that every person has a different idea of what this organization is about – and where it should put its resources.
Your mission also gives your center consistency over time. Individual leaders will come and go, but the center can go on with stability and focus if the next generation of practitioners understands what it was designed to achieve. It’s true that you may adjust your mission as time goes by and needs change, but having a mission ensures these changes will happen intentionally rather than as the result of disconnection and assumptions. Giving board members a sense of the organization’s history as part of their orientation helps them understand the legacy they’ve inherited from the leaders before them.
You may find that as you discuss the mission, a variety of other issues will come up. Set up a “parking lot” for ideas, questions and concerns that may not be directly related to the conversation at hand but are important to address before things can go forward. This can take the form of a white board, a flip chart, a projected computer screen, or anything workable to which a facilitator can add items and which everyone can see. Make sure you come back to these parked items periodically so nothing slips through the cracks and creates a problem down the road.
You may also find that you have to put aside the discussion of the mission in order to get clarity about larger underlying expectations, perceptions and assumptions. You may see some of your parked items coalesce into an underlying theme that needs attention. If it becomes clear that a few board members assume that you will be offering a traditional Soto Zen practice calendar, while a few more are under the impression that the center is not tied to any particular Buddhist denomination, and the remaining folks take it for granted that any and all varieties of meditation, religious or secular, will be taught at your center, it may be time to stop thinking about the mission statement itself for a little while and have a candid conversation about the practice approach your organization will take and why it exists.
The SWOT analysis
You might have an idea about the focus you’d like the new center to have, or you may have only a general feeling about its purpose. By looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, you’ll uncover the unique contribution your center can make in the world of Zen practice. You’ll be making note of your potential participants’ unmet needs and matching them to the skills, abilities and interests of the center’s leadership. You’ll also be considering the particular challenges you’ll face either because of resources not available in your own sangha or because of the external environment.
Strengths and weakness are internal to your center. Ask yourself: What are the characteristics of our center that will help us to help others to awaken? What skills, experience, tangible and intangible resources, and advantages does our center have that put it in a unique position to enable practice? Then look at the other side. What are the characteristics of our organization that are going to get in the way of our ability to make practice available? What skills, experience, tangible and intangible resources are we missing?
Next, look outside of the center itself at the environment in which it operates to assess opportunities and threats. What conditions exist in society, the community, the universe of Zen practice or in the world at large that are going to help us work toward liberation? What conditions are going to be challenging to us? Answering these questions may require a little research. You’ll need to stay informed about what’s going on in the denomination, what kinds of Buddhist practice are available in your city or state, and perhaps even the activities of nearby churches or relevant nonprofits. Where are your potential participants putting their time, funds and attention these days? All of these things can affect the way you carry out your mission.
Make a list of these strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. Don’t take time now to work out ways of resolving deficits or meeting challenges. Instead, look for patterns that might suggest where your center could be most effective, based on what your people are most skilled at doing, what resources are in place now or could be easily acquired, opportunities created by the way things are in the world at the moment, and any other advantages you perceive in your current situation. Think about unmet needs that your center can fill, things you can make available that would be otherwise unavailable in your area. If your clergy are particularly well-trained in a certain aspect of practice, that might be a good focus. Maybe you have access to a facility that’s ideal for a specific kind of activity, like sesshin or children’s practice. Perhaps your center is in a college town, where zazen practice would provide a good balance for academics. What will give your center a unique market position?
Use the weaknesses and threats to discern what kind of focus might be ill-advised at this time, and what sort of initiatives will take extra resources. Even though a particular kind of activity seems to be contraindicated by your SWOT analysis, your board may still feel that it’s worthwhile and want to pursue it, especially if directors are interested in breaking new ground of some kind or piloting an innovative approach to practice. Just be aware that it may not be easy to get those initiatives off the ground with this challenging focus, and it may take plenty of time and resources.
To write your mission statement, you’ll need to know three things: the goal of the services you provide, what those services are, and who’s using them. These three things are interconnected, and although we’ll discuss them here in a linear way, board discussion will likely move back and forth among them.
Using the information you’ve uncovered in the SWOT analysis, draft a goal for your center’s practice offerings. Don’t worry yet about what the program looks like or what elements it should include. Just consider what you would like to see happen as a result of people’s participation. How will their lives and practice change? What will they be able to do? What will they gain from practicing with you? What are the effects on the larger community?
Think carefully about the people your center will serve. That may sound like a waste of time. It’s a Soto Zen center. It serves practitioners. There. Done. Next! But are you really setting out to serve all practitioners? In all walks of life? In every stage of their training? Anywhere in the world? If many of your members are retirees, children’s practice may not be a high priority at your center. However, if your center’s neighborhood is filled with young families, then children’s practice becomes more important. If your center is a startup in a city in which practice has been unavailable up to now, your members will need a significant amount of basic religious education – something an established sangha might do less often in favor of providing opportunities for more experienced practitioners. Will you be providing professional training to novices, or concentrating mainly on working with the laity? Where are your members likely to come from? Maybe your center is the only one for miles around, and seeks to serve those who may be practicing on their own without a teacher but live too far away to attend regularly in person. That might change the way you develop and deliver your activities. The more you know about your members, the more skillful your means can be – in other words, the better you can tailor your activities and focus your valuable resources on meeting their specific needs. A broad, vague mission is less likely to result in the kind of transformation that lies at the heart of our practice.
Now consider what it will take to reach your goals. In general, what kind of resources will your center need to offer in order for participants to receive the benefits you’ve outlined? Don’t just list off all the practice activities you can think of. Concentrate on developing a coherent set of activities and resources in which each and every element is directly related to the goal you’ve written, and arises directly from the needs of the specific people you will serve. Other ideas may seem fun and interesting, but if they don’t move you toward your goal, they will take valuable resources from your mission and cause you to veer off in an unrelated direction. Resist the urge to justify these unrelated activities by inflating their importance as fundraisers or convincing yourself they will bring more first-time visitors to the center. If they don’t fit, they just don’t.
Having come to some basic agreement on these three elements—goal, services and recipients—you’re ready to begin drafting a mission statement. It might look something like this:
- The mission of ABC Zen Center is to create and sustain a harmonious environment for the study and practice of Soto Zen for people seeking to overcome personal suffering.
- The mission of HJK Zen Center is to provide training, practice and service opportunities that foster social and individual transformation for practitioners nationwide interested in social service, chaplaincy and the environment.
- The mission of XYZ Zen Center is to provide the local and regional sangha with a place to pursue Zen studies, participate in zazen, and learn to integrate practice with daily work.
- The mission of 123 Zen Center is to make the teachings of [teacher or ancestor] and the tradition of the Soto school available to novices and laypeople through education, formal and informal practice opportunities, and connection with the sangha.
Objectives
The mission is a pretty big picture of long-term achievement. If fact, it’s so large that the board might be hard-pressed to know where get started with the actual work. That’s why objectives are important. They break the mission down into smaller, shorter-term pieces that are easier to imagine and undertake. For example, if the mission statement is to make the tradition and practices of the Soto school available to novices and laypeople through education, formal and informal practice opportunities, and connection with the sangha, then objectives like these might follow:
- Develop and implement an annual budget that balances revenue and expenditures.
- Build community by developing a communications plan that enables members to come together for practice and fellowship.
- Establish a membership program that connects the sangha and builds a sustainable annual funding base.
- Ensure long-term sufficiency of resources for accomplishment of the mission by establishing a development plan
- Ensure stable, skillful center leadership by engaging in a thoughtful board nomination process.
- Find or build a facility adequate to house practice activities, the head cleric, and two to three resident practitioners.
- Create and implement a program designed to make Soto Zen teachings and traditions available to novices and laypeople.
Strategies
Your strategies are the steps you will take to solve problems, overcome obstacles and achieve each objective. They break the objectives down still further into manageable projects that can be taken on by teams or individuals, always bearing in mind the needs of those participating in your activities. (It may be appropriate to hand the objectives to an appropriate committee or staff department, if they are in place, and ask these specialists to come up with the strategies and tactics.) If one of your objectives is Build community by developing a communications plan that enables members to come together for practice and fellowship, some strategies might be:
- Design, produce and distribute a quarterly newsletter
- Write and distribute a monthly e-mail update
- Create and maintain a website that reflects the values and priorities of the center
- Regularly write and distribute press releases promoting upcoming events to local newspapers
- Hold regular sangha meetings to explain initiatives, give updates and take feedback.
- Develop and implement communications initiatives aimed specifically at connecting and supporting novices in their training
Tactics
Finally, each strategy needs a set of specific and concrete tasks that can be assigned and monitored. For instance, if one of your strategies is Regularly write and distribute press releases promoting upcoming events to local newspapers, some of the requisite tasks might be:
- Make a list of all the local papers that serve our area, including dailies, weeklies, college papers, and neighborhood news sheets.
- Find contact information for each paper, including editor’s or religion editor’s name and land or e-mail address.
- Determine who will serve as the media contact for the center, in case the papers need further information.
- Shoot and file photos that can be sent with releases as appropriate.
- Write and send releases at least a month before each event.
- Follow up with editors as needed.
- Monitor papers for releases or stories published, and keep a clip file.
- Review clip file periodically to see what kind of releases are being published and where; adapt future releases to increase probability of publication.
An example
By the time you’ve thought through the mission, objectives, strategies and tactics, you will be able to see a very direct connection between any tactic and the overall mission. In our example:
The mission of 123 Zen Center is to make the tradition and practices of the Soto school available to novices and laypeople through education, formal and informal practice opportunities, and connection with the sangha.
- Build community by developing a communications plan that enables members to come together for practice and fellowship.
- Write and distribute press releases promoting upcoming events to local newspapers
- Shoot and file photos that can be sent with releases as appropriate.
The mission of 123 Zen Center is to make the tradition and practices of the Soto school available to novices and laypeople through education, formal and informal practice opportunities, and connection with the sangha.
- Build community by developing a communications plan that enables members to come together for practice and fellowship.
- Write and distribute press releases promoting upcoming events to local newspapers
- Shoot and file photos that can be sent with releases as appropriate.
The value of connecting the dots
If you can’t make a direct connection between the mission and something that’s going on in your center, it’s time to rethink that activity. If this sort of thing seems to be happening a lot, it may be that the process of coming up with the center’s mission left out a major consideration and the mission itself needs adjustment. However, it’s more likely that the orphan initiative was undertaken for its own sake and did not arise from the identified mission and needs of practitioners.
Boards sometimes resist creating this sort of plan because they’re worried that they’ll be locked into a rigid, lifeless list of chores from one year to the next, unable to take advantage of an unforeseen opportunity or a fresh idea that comes along. Your center can definitely embrace wonderful new initiatives—when they advance your mission. Having a detailed plan in place makes it easy to quickly determine whether or not a new project is an opportunity or a distraction, and to reroute that project’s people and resources into something more effective.
Here’s an example. In one center, a practitioner with a strong personality decided to design and take on a small building project that she felt would benefit the teacher. The center had no strategic plan in place for building initiatives, and no budget for such projects. Although some sangha leaders were aware of the proposal, it was unclear where leadership for these things specifically resided, and the practitioner forged ahead on her own. She put many hours into the project, and when it was done she proudly unveiled it, expecting to be thanked by a grateful sangha and to see the project put to immediate use. Instead, the sangha was only vaguely interested, and while people didn’t have any objection to the finished product, no one felt particularly compelled to use it. Some were worried about where the money would come from to pay for it. The practitioner was hurt and angry, and made a noisy departure from the center for good.
How could this have been avoided? Had a plan been in place, and roles clearly defined, it would have been clear to this practitioner where to take her idea. A discussion of the proposal and a review of the plan would have shown that this was not an effective use of resources toward achieving the mission. It did not correspond to an identified need, and there were higher priorities for the resources. Because the decision not to go forward would have been based on the center’s existing plan, rather than any one person’s opinion, things would not have gotten personal. This well-meaning practitioner’s energy could have gone into something that everyone would have felt able to support, and there would have been a clear benefit at the end. The sangha would have been sincerely grateful for the project, and the practitioner would have felt like a valued member of the practice community.
In a different Zen center, one of the practitioners approached the board with an idea for special event. He knew an author who happened to be coming to town, and felt strongly that the center should invite this writer to give an evening lecture as a benefit for the center. In his view, the event would generate revenue and bring people into the center, and would require little from the organization in terms of resources. He volunteered to head up the initiative, and while the board had only lukewarm interest, it wanted to encourage volunteerism, didn’t want to hurt the practitioner’s feelings, and didn’t feel it had any good reason to say no. Of course, there were several problems. Because the author’s topic was only marginally related to spiritual practice of any kind, it was not of particular interest to the sangha. Likewise, first-time visitors who were drawn only by this writer’s presentation had little interest in Zen practice and were unlikely to become members or to return for other activities. The center had to pay the bills for printing flyers, providing refreshments, and other needs that go with such public events, and attention was diverted from other activities already in place. In the end, attendance was low, the net funds raised were minimal, and volunteer morale took a dip.
How could such good intentions and wholehearted efforts to support the center have gone so awry? The board’s own lack of enthusiasm about the project should have been a signal that it required some more thought. Because the event did not arise from identified needs, it was unconnected to the life of the center. Rather than starting with a focus on needs and goals and then actively determining how to meet them, the center passively latched onto whatever “opportunity” seemed to come its way, whether or not it was a good fit. Channeling the sincere efforts of the volunteers and the valuable resources of the center into an intentional initiative aligned with its mission—an initiative that the board and sangha could enthusiastically support—would have made it much more likely that the event would have built community, enhanced practice, and generated much-needed revenue.
If you can’t make a direct connection between the mission and something that’s going on in your center, it’s time to rethink that activity. If this sort of thing seems to be happening a lot, it may be that the process of coming up with the center’s mission left out a major consideration and the mission itself needs adjustment. However, it’s more likely that the orphan initiative was undertaken for its own sake and did not arise from the identified mission and needs of practitioners.
Boards sometimes resist creating this sort of plan because they’re worried that they’ll be locked into a rigid, lifeless list of chores from one year to the next, unable to take advantage of an unforeseen opportunity or a fresh idea that comes along. Your center can definitely embrace wonderful new initiatives—when they advance your mission. Having a detailed plan in place makes it easy to quickly determine whether or not a new project is an opportunity or a distraction, and to reroute that project’s people and resources into something more effective.
Here’s an example. In one center, a practitioner with a strong personality decided to design and take on a small building project that she felt would benefit the teacher. The center had no strategic plan in place for building initiatives, and no budget for such projects. Although some sangha leaders were aware of the proposal, it was unclear where leadership for these things specifically resided, and the practitioner forged ahead on her own. She put many hours into the project, and when it was done she proudly unveiled it, expecting to be thanked by a grateful sangha and to see the project put to immediate use. Instead, the sangha was only vaguely interested, and while people didn’t have any objection to the finished product, no one felt particularly compelled to use it. Some were worried about where the money would come from to pay for it. The practitioner was hurt and angry, and made a noisy departure from the center for good.
How could this have been avoided? Had a plan been in place, and roles clearly defined, it would have been clear to this practitioner where to take her idea. A discussion of the proposal and a review of the plan would have shown that this was not an effective use of resources toward achieving the mission. It did not correspond to an identified need, and there were higher priorities for the resources. Because the decision not to go forward would have been based on the center’s existing plan, rather than any one person’s opinion, things would not have gotten personal. This well-meaning practitioner’s energy could have gone into something that everyone would have felt able to support, and there would have been a clear benefit at the end. The sangha would have been sincerely grateful for the project, and the practitioner would have felt like a valued member of the practice community.
In a different Zen center, one of the practitioners approached the board with an idea for special event. He knew an author who happened to be coming to town, and felt strongly that the center should invite this writer to give an evening lecture as a benefit for the center. In his view, the event would generate revenue and bring people into the center, and would require little from the organization in terms of resources. He volunteered to head up the initiative, and while the board had only lukewarm interest, it wanted to encourage volunteerism, didn’t want to hurt the practitioner’s feelings, and didn’t feel it had any good reason to say no. Of course, there were several problems. Because the author’s topic was only marginally related to spiritual practice of any kind, it was not of particular interest to the sangha. Likewise, first-time visitors who were drawn only by this writer’s presentation had little interest in Zen practice and were unlikely to become members or to return for other activities. The center had to pay the bills for printing flyers, providing refreshments, and other needs that go with such public events, and attention was diverted from other activities already in place. In the end, attendance was low, the net funds raised were minimal, and volunteer morale took a dip.
How could such good intentions and wholehearted efforts to support the center have gone so awry? The board’s own lack of enthusiasm about the project should have been a signal that it required some more thought. Because the event did not arise from identified needs, it was unconnected to the life of the center. Rather than starting with a focus on needs and goals and then actively determining how to meet them, the center passively latched onto whatever “opportunity” seemed to come its way, whether or not it was a good fit. Channeling the sincere efforts of the volunteers and the valuable resources of the center into an intentional initiative aligned with its mission—an initiative that the board and sangha could enthusiastically support—would have made it much more likely that the event would have built community, enhanced practice, and generated much-needed revenue.