Program development for the future

Excerpt

This summer marked my fifth anniversary as your Executive Director and—more importantly—the mid-point of our first fiscal year since completing the financial recovery plan that has guided so much of our work since 1998.

We've cut the staff at headquarters to about half it's size during peak years of the 1990s and we've reduced senior staff positions from six to three. We've modernized our information system, rebuilt our member database, and implemented a new fiscal management system. We restructured membership levels and benefits and enhanced the technical quality and professional development opportunities available at our annual conferences. We combined Conservation Voices and the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation into a single, flagship publication and initiated a web-based monthly newsletter.

These changes have made us leaner and meaner, as the clich6 goes, and also wiser. We've learned some important lessons in the past five years that we need to keep in mind as we look forward to the next five years. Here are the two I think are most important.

We've learned we can't rely on membership dues to provide …