Category: Uncategorized

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Mandy Gooch, who volunteers for the Strategic Planning Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Strategic Planning (SP) committee member, I am involved in helping to grow and develop the OTW as an organization through implementation of its strategic planning goals. We do this work so that the OTW can keep focused on particular things we want to have happen in the future, and so that we’ll have the guidelines and tools we need to help that happen.

Some of the ways we’ll do this is to make sure volunteers understand their roles and how to do them, to make sure our board and the leaders of our committees can hand their roles on to others when they need to change their positions or move on, and to make it as easy and clear as possible to do the different tasks that the OTW, as a non-profit, needs to do to be accountable to its users and supporters. My committee doesn’t come up with these plans so much as it helps all the different parts of the OTW come up with them. We help them decide what’s truly important for both their committee and the OTW as a whole, and then help make sure that progress is getting made by all parts of the organization since some groups are farther along in some details than others. Because Strategic Planning’s mission is about the future, we work most closely with the Board and the chairs of the OTW committees who will guide us there, and help them think about what’s coming when they’re usually busy dealing with today’s problems.

Read More