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Achieving a Full-Time RE Director
One of the goals of our FUSS long-range planning has been the staffing of our Religious Education program. For several years now, we have experienced a very energized RE program for our children and youth. We also know that we have benefited from an excellent and credentialed DRE, though she was compensated only as a part-time employee. We have felt that our part time staff position needed to be improved. We made an initial attempt a year ago to step up to our DRE goal, but we weren’t quite ready.
During the past year, we again reviewed our goals. One element of our long-range plan focused on staffing. To take advantage of experts, during the past year have had five or more visits from UUA credentialed advisors. They strongly encouraged staffing our RE program as full-time, thereby cementing an RE program that can be sustained, a program that will continue to nourish not only our children, but our entire congregation.
This financial step up in order to achieve our goal has not been easy. The step was high. We have struggled to mount that step. But our pledge drive didn’t make the ends meet. Was it just too high? We considered the options.
One option would be to forget about our goal for now, perhaps wait for times to improve or for some unknown benefactor. Some thought that approach to be the first step in a slow slide to ultimate extinction.
Another option was to look at it in the manner that a business does when they want to expand. That would be to look for some “venture capital.” That would be a means to actually begin operating according to our goal, but with the expectation that we must work very hard to maintain this step-up in performance.
Our FUSS Trusts Committee has financed us to achieve that step-up that we could not otherwise attain. Though limited in amount it permits us to feel that vision, our goal. Now we must show that we can handle our goal. (Bob Miller)
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Bob Miller