[bob]

There has to be a balance between our missions and programs and our organizational and financial capacities. Our mission does drive what we do but how we doit and how we fund it have to be serious considerations .

[bob]

It’s funny how that works. And when we find these creative solutions, we sometimes have to bring people along kicking and screaming. Some folks hate change…they just want to leave things as they are and move forward. Problem is, and they don’t understand, that there is no “forward” if we leave things as they are.

In finding these new opportunities though, we still have to bring them back to mission.

[bob]

We are an outdoor public garden. Our earned revenues and contributed support are roughly equal with a little more weighted toward earned revenues. coming out of the pandemic where we received significant funding through the Cares Act (PPP, ERC) we found that our financial and organizational capacities were out of whack with our mission and programs. Our staffing was inadequate as were our financial resources. If we had continued down the current path, we would have fallen into a truly difficult financial situation. We were unsustainable in our current form.

We determined that we needed to develop some blockbuster programming to increase our financial capacity so that we could increase our organizational capacity. It was all driven by our mission and programs (what we do and what we’re so passionate about. We now think out-of-the-box because we have to. It’s not an easy fix and takes time. Our staff is learning why we do the things we do (they often are mainly focused on mission/programs.