August 17, 2012
It is not unusual for us to hear the question, “What does the national office do??” Truthfully, there are days when we ask ourselves! It is not entirely rare that 2 or 3 hours into the day Shelly or I will say, “Well, now I can get started with my work!” We can spend that much time responding to phone and email requests from members that range across the board of VFP life. After four months in the office, Mike Reid is still saying, “I just can’t get a handle on all this email.”
Some outside the office have responded to this as a problem to be solved. I don’t see it that way. I think it is valuable that we are able to have as much timely interaction as we do. In fact, in the office we are more likely to feel the dearth of contact, to feel we don’t have a full enough sense of what is happening in the many chapters. Our most reliable news of chapter work comes from VFP newsletters and in news coverage that shows up in Google. Even at that, the view of VFP’s presence across our country can be pretty stunning.
This spring when we were developing the new website one of our goals was to share the chapter view of VFP as much as possible. That’s why we have chapter news and the media feed on the front page, why we have created a web page for each chapter, why we have begun asking for monthly contact and activity reports from chapters.
A lot of what the national office (and your hardworking Board) does is mundane but if it helps any of us achieve a sense of the whole of who VFP is, how VFP is and how we can become better, we have been successful. IMHO. (In my humble opinion.)