It’s not even halfway through the year, and we’ve already learned a ton about our impact through our active implementation of ReVisioning. One of the things we are excited to share with you is this “Network Impact Blueprint” that was largely informed by our work launching National Action Teams and our diagnostic year on the 911 Program area.
Code for America Summit was last week and we spent our time there exploring the theme: Building the path forward together. For us in the Network, building the path means outlining how we have impact, and together means with you!
We are excited to do this work together and have identified this MOU process as one of the key levers we have to do that effectively. To work together means to be held together by relationships. We need our MOU and other volunteer agreements to capture and support productive, reciprocal relationships for our collective work. That is not easily done, it will take time and intention, but it is critical to do It right, perhaps most of all for a Network defined by its relationships.
You might have noticed that we have not met the timeline for developing a new MOU that we laid out in our last MOU. We realized that to do this right, to develop agreements that support productive, reciprocal relationships and to develop those agreements together, we simply need more time. Our plan is to extend the provisional MOU for a year (with a few changes, detailed here, as few as we could manage) and use that time to engage in a more expansive conversation about our blueprint for impact and how we work together to make our Network and relationships thrive.
Learn how your Brigade can complete the 2023 MOU process here. The MOU process officially launches on Tuesday, May 31st.
Here are ways to engage over the next year:
- Sign up for Impact Sprints and register your projects to work together to monitor and define partner driven impact that our next MOU will be built around
- Attend the Direct Democracy workshops to develop our muscles of deliberation and collective decision-making to finalize the next MOU
- Join a Brigade Organizing Branches working group and help us shape the contents of the MOU and volunteer agreements and build the sustainable infrastructure for their continued adaptation
- Attend Brigade Congress (virtually or in person) to participate in the release and subsequent deliberation of the next iteration of the MOU and introduction of volunteer agreements
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Re-sign the next provisional MOU to participate in any of the above!
At the 2022 Summit, we shared that today’s network is a “brilliant spectrum of volunteer opportunities”. Much of that spectrum is represented by the different ways you can engage with the MOU above. But each opportunity begins with a relationship: our relationship with you. We are grateful for it, we are centering it, and we are excited to continue growing it.
