Visioning
What is Visioning & How it Can Help YOUR Club
 
Visioning allows your club members to imagine and characterize what your club could be. From this vision, club members can develop a new sense of identity and a renewed commitment to make the club better than it is today.  It can also reaffirm the sense of purpose for clubs that are already doing successful work.
 
Visioning promotes consensus, consistency, and continuity for club activities, it’s leadership, and the culture of the organization. Visioning can help any club that wants to grow and become more effective. 
 
The first step is for your club to schedule a Visioning presentation at one of its regular meetings.  This helps ensure all members understand the process and their roles as participants. One of the district Visioning team members will fully explain Visioning and its benefits and answer any questions about the program. The goal is to provide your members and leadership with whatever information they need to fully support the effort. 
 
The Visioning event itself is conducted at a scheduled 3 to 4 hour evening meeting in which a team of trained Rotarian facilitators will work with your club members to identify what’s important in the areas of:
 
club attributes (“Who we are”)
club size
community service
fundraising
administration
public image
foundation
vocational service
youth service
leadership development
international service
 
 
Participants are encouraged to think outside the box and imagine how an ideal version of the club would look in three years. Facilitators are there to drive the process – all ideas come from club members. Ideas are captured and then prioritized. This process often generates innovative ideas and gives members a sense of what the club values most and provides an opportunity to voice ideas that they might otherwise not have. More work is required at 2 to 3 subsequent club meetings to turn these ideas into actions.
 
We’ll supply you with a suite of materials to help club members and leadership identify the top few dreams and ideas from the workshop, clarify them, and turn them into an actionable plan.  If your club would like hands-on support from the team after the workshop, we’ll do that too.  We can coach your leaders on how to facilitate club assemblies on the results of the workshop or lead your assemblies as a neutral facilitator.  Or something in between that tailors the support to your club’s needs.
 
So why bother with the Visioning process? To a club that has not defined who they are, what they stand for and what they intend to do, anything and everything is an opportunity or challenge.  All it takes is the strongest personality, the one who will give the most time, or an authoritarian leader, and you run the risk of following personal agendas, short-term gratifications and individual legacies. The premise of Visioning is “how can we get back to a team that is pulling in the same direction, without waiting for a crisis to focus the team?”
 
The simple act of writing down long-term goals in a group setting is a great team building exercise, and fosters consensus on ideas and direction. Many clubs try to do create a club vision on their own.  These self-facilitated approaches are often well intended but unstructured and have limited success as the facilitators are too close to the content. Our facilitators understand both the big picture of how Rotary clubs work, and their role as neutral administrators of the process. The Visioning process has been professionally developed and used hundreds of times around the globe.
 
Our intent is to help each club be as effective and successful as possible. The entire Visioning Team feels deeply that this program can be an important tool to help you achieve those goals.
 
If you’d like more information about Visioning, or to schedule a presentation, please contact Ron Faccenda, D7910 Visioning Chair at rfac88@gmail.com, or 508-932-7235.
 
posted 11/20/18