New Year Starts with a Bang!

I’m happy I took a few days to catch my breath over the holidays. I’ve been anticipating that this is going to be a great year for me personally and for ChristmasFuture – and i've been more than correct so far! Things have continued along a ‘destined’ path as reality continues to conspire to bring ChristmasFuture to the world. We have a pretty straight line towards our launch this Christmas!

• We started fairly early by getting our core team together with a few experts to hold our inaugural annual strategic planning session. We spent the entire day talking about priorities and goals of the organization, working towards formalizing the next revision of our strategic plan.

• We’ve had some fantastic success with our pilot project. Over 600 students learned about global citizenship, extreme poverty, and NGO’s…and many of them went through an ‘awakening’…saying things like ‘nobody ever told me that the rest of the world doesn’t live like us’ or ‘we’ve gotta do something…now!”. Through that program they donated over $10,000 CDN towards the building of a school library in Sauri, Kenya – as part of a holistic plan for that village.

• We’ve begun our operational fundraising campaign for the last 2 weeks of 2006 and were able to raise over $70,000 towards our 2007 operational budget of $450,000. There’s been an amazing response.

• We initiated something called ‘The Founders’ – anyone that has given time or money towards our 2007 budget will always be known as one of The Founders…the first people that were willing to say there was something wrong in the world and they are going to do something about it!

• There have been several talks initiated at a partnership level with various other organizations that want to change the world…for good! We are truly defining and participating in what it means to be the next generation of NGO’s…and similar people and organizations are gravitating towards each other. It’s truly and exciting time!

• As we continue to be available and prepared all of the right things just keep happening! When we think we’ve got it all figured out it falls apart. When we ‘let go’ the magic just keeps happening!

• We’re fully in the transitional stage of an organization between ‘startup’ and ‘systems’ stages – we are formalizing process, policies, and tools as we grow and reach the necessary organizational capability to achieve our goal of launching in 2007 and moving towards eradicating extreme poverty!

• We are all very conscious of the fact that the choices we make now shape the culture of the organization and each step determines who we collectively are. I’ve heard it said that as you do one thing you do all things…so we are striving to uphold our core values ion every interaction and choice we make.

That’s about it for now. I’ll keep you posted as we move forward…so many amazing things happening! Thank you for staying with us for the ride so far.

…jay