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Delegates ponder the Club's future direction.
Photo by John Byrne Barry

by Debbi Landshoff
Direction Setting

For the deliberative session on Thursday afternoon, each delegate was assigned to one of 80 round tables. My table had eight people. We seemed a pretty representative bunch—people from chapters, groups, and national committees. We had a lot of experience in range of campaigns. I enjoyed everyone in the group!

Most of us had participated in priority-setting sessions at the local level or within national committees, but in his opening remarks, Carl Pope asked us to go beyond any decisions our groups made earlier and listen and learn from each other.

For most of the next several hours, each table worked through a series of exercises. We discussed how the Sierra Club has made a difference in the past, what the year 2020 would be like if we achieve our conservation goals, the relative merits of each of eight conservation approaches, and the Club’s current effectiveness in each of these approaches. At the end of the evening, we took two sets of votes—one on prioritizing the eight proposed conservation approaches, and a second on how effective the Club was on all eight approaches.

Unfortunately, at my table, we didn’t really grasp the reason for these the discussions, so our conversation was unfocused and didn’t help us prepare our votes. I voted the way I would have voted whether or not we spent these hours preparing for the vote. Perhaps I would have done regardless of the quality of the discussion.

I'm going to be better prepared for sessions on Saturday.

-- 09/08/2005 Thu
4pm