On March 12, Dave Tenny wrote:
Good Friday afternoon, everyone – having given our meeting earlier this week and yesterday’s exchange with Jason more thought, I have come up with what I hope is a fairly simple approach to strengthening the draft Vision Statement. In the Google doc I lay out a simple (I hope) attempt to combine and harmonize principles in the draft Vision Statement and the CEO Principles using the questions I posed in my earlier email. A number of important initial points:
- I intentionally try to keep everything at a high level appropriate for a vision statement and, therefore, have not included some of the more weedy details.
- I recommend not trying to develop a discreet definition of the term “climate smart” in the Vision Statement. Rather, I suggest that the vision lay out principles using known terms that collectively would be smart to do to and, therefore, “climate smart.” That prevents spinning our wheels on trying to define something that is relatively new and abstract.
- I have attempted to harmonize the Vision Statement and CEO Principles where they overlap.
- I have tried to use a consistent voice in the principles that result from combining and harmonizing the Vision Statement and the CEO principles. This required changing sentence structure in some cases.
- I am trying not to change text at this point except for harmonization and clarification – this would be a baseline for edits going forward (including mine
)
- I am certain I didn’t get it right in the first try. The idea is to start with my feeble attempt and make improving edits until we are comfortable.
If the group thinks this approach is worthwhile, it could help focus and simplify our work going forward.
Today I reply:
Hi Dave,
Thanks for getting the ball rolling on this. I think it’s a good approach.
Given that it seems that a revision (rewrite??) of the Vision statement may be the main focus of our group, we are going to need to make some changes to the facilitation and composition of the WG. Vince is lining up the details of the former — more to come soon. In regard to the latter, I have had two concerns related to balance that have been growing stronger as we’ve added new people in recent weeks:
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Up until now, I have been the sole representative of an ENGO on the WG. Believe me, this hasn’t been for lack of trying to recruit others! However, with the turn that things are taking, I am stepping up efforts to expand ENGO participation. In addition, with SFI at the table, I think it’s important for FSC to be represented.
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In spite of the fact that the scope of the Summit is N. America, our group has been heavily weighted to the U.S., with only one representative from Canada (Peter). This also needs to be addressed.
To these ends, I’d like to welcome the following additional members:
Cliff Wallis, Alberta Wilderness Association
Brad Kahn, FSC US
Francois Dufresne, FSC Canada
Paige Goff, Domtar
Etienne Belanger, FPAC
There will likely be at least 2-3 more from the ENGO side.
Dave, I moved your “Simple Approach” from the 4 prompts document to the Vision statement document in our shared folder - I pasted it after the current Vision statement. I suggest we use this going forward, as it’s a logical place plus Ara already put in some comments.
I am going to work with others to build off of what you started. One thing we will want to do is emphasize the elements of the existing Vision statement that are critical for our support — some of which are not addressed in what you shared. It will probably take some time for us to put together a cogent response, but for sure it’s a priority.
Finally, I’ll note that we are continuing to communicate by email in spite of my best efforts to move us over to the CLF Forum where our exchanges are visible to all Summit participants. I’d still like to encourage us to use that platform, and accordingly I copied these emails in under the “Whither the Vision statement” topic. However, I am prepared to give up on this if it doesn’t want to happen.