On Sunday, August 19, we held our annual board retreat with a small, dedicated group on InStill board members, advisers, and teachers (Paula Bolte, Doro Kiley, Swede McBroom, Lori Marsh, Courtney Pace, Anna Pittman, Jamie Reygle, and Beverly Robinette)

We commenced the day with a communication piece led by Anna, which helped set the tone for the day by creating a deep sense of connection between the participants.

Guiding Principles:

Our initial task was to identify guiding principles and values for the organization. After proposing dozens of possibilities, these were agreed to be our core guiding principles and values:

Stakeholders / Need / Blue Sky:

We then went on to define our stakeholders (which turned out to be a broad cross-section of the community), and identified community need. Armed with this information, we then conducted a blue-sky brainstorm to help identify the course we would take if we had unlimited resources.

Direction:

Our main objective for the day was to identify what kind of organization we want InStill to become. We broke into two groups to come up with independent versions of this, and both groups came to pretty much the same conclusions, ie:

• Group 1: Saw InStill as a kind of resource center, which would provide mindfulness-based resources—including teaching classes—to anyone who asked, and with a particular focus on schools, prisons, churches, rehab centers, seniors, businesses, 4-H, CSBs, hospice, and public leaders. We would also aim to connect people with deeper opportunities to practice mindfulness places like retreat centers and monasteries. The overriding theme being, Teach a person to fish…
• Group 2: Again saw InStill as a kind of resource center, offering the following:

We identified the imagery of being a thread, weaving mindfulness through the Southwest Virginia community.

First steps:

To finish the day, we identified the immediate steps we can take to begin moving in the direction we had identified. These were:

• Train ourselves in InStill’s ‘brand’ of mindfulness by making a commitment to attend our retreats and classes, which will help make each of us ‘Ambassadors’ for our program.
• Define who we need to put this direction into play, eg. Volunteer coordinator, volunteers, etc. And identify the time commitment required of said individuals.
• Lori will begin communicating with 4-H, so we can commence instilling mindfulness there.
• Swede will continue to develop his retreat center, which will also be able to serve as a training center.
• Develop criteria for InStill satellite resource centers at key locations throughout Southwest Virginia (eg. Blacksburg, Roanoke, Abingdon, Martinsville, Covington, Bedford, Wytheville, and Wise). This would include materials, policies, support, ‘approved’ materials, a resource list, and general guidelines to maintain integrity.
• Begin supporting and facilitating the development of mindfulness rooms in facilities throughout the region.
• Determine how to talk about mindfulness in a secular way that distinguishes between mindfulness and other disciplines that incorporate meditation.