By Mukhya devi dasi
The 2018 North American Leadership Conference was held last week at Camp Geneva outside of Orlando, Florida, with 27 temple presidents from the US and Canada attending.
This year’s event was organized by 3 temple presidents – Mukhya devi dasi from ISKCON Alachua, Ananda Vrindavan devi dasi from ISKCON of DC, Sandamini devi dasi from ISKCON Tucson. For the past year they were guided through the organizational process of creating a new model for the annual meeting by Gopinath Bloch (one of the directors of The Sanga Initiative).
Gopinath recently got his masters degree in Organizational Development and this knowledge base coupled with a lifetime in ISKCON and his personal desire to see Srila Prabhupada’s movement move successfully into the future made for a very exciting and eye opening process. The final outcome was two and a half days of North American temple presidents connecting, growing and relaxing in ways we have never done together.
The meeting schedule and process was created by Gopinath and a colleague from his master’s program, Rebecca Mintz, who has been active in doing Organization Development for non profits for the past ten years. Everyone agreed she fit seamlessly into our organization, and her help and input was worth more than we could say, or pay. And Rebecca stepped in to spend the time with us gratis!
The sessions were interactive and totally engaging, completely created around our needs and purposes. Just some of those were:
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building communication
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finding our common goal
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sharing best practices
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receiving wisdom from each other
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large national and international changes
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growing past crisis management
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clarifying roles in temple management
We took time to learn about each other, our management preferences, how to work with people who have different styles than we do, and from this base we moved on into exploring issues that were important to different people.
Temple Presidents discussed:
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Succession Plans in ISKCON* (Vedasara das, Atlanta and Nityananda das, Houston)
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Book Distribution and Harinama Sankirtan: how to keep these programs alive (Sarvatarak das, New Orleans)
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Formal Education/Training for Newcomers (Jaya Krishna das, New Vrindavan)
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An all-ISKCON NA Media Production Team (Deva Madhava das, Ypsilanti)
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Helping temples become NACPO compliant (Mukhya dasi, Alachua and Ananda Vrindavan dasi, D.C.)
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Next Gen Council *– -provide training, mentors, funding for our youth world wide (Deva Madhava das, Ypsilanti)
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How to give Krishna Consciousness to every person in your state (Krishna Kirtan das, Delaware)
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Forming a NA TP council *, (Manu das, Vancouver) this topic was merged with Succession Plans, and garnered a robust discussion
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More Gurus with fewer disciples (Kalakantha das, Gainesville), great presentation on Srila Prabhupada’s position on taking disciples (“every boy, girl, man, woman should be an acharya”); discussions on why so many are reticent to engage in this service, why more could and should. We need thousands of gurus with dozens of disciples rather than dozens of gurus with thousands of disciples
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Jaya Krishna (New Vrindavan) shared fundraising ideas, it was impressive to hear about the thoughtful ways the devotees deal with their many guests that visit them every year in New Vrindavan.
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Kalakantha (Gainesville) shared great information about recruiting and training new devotees which inspired everyone – especially our temples in NA that have ashrams specifically for this purpose (Denver, Ypsilanti) as well as other temples that are just developing the ashram and training programs.
Several of us met to create a much needed communication tool, an online Temple President-only forum that would allow us to throw out questions and get feedback from other TPs who might be experiencing similar situations. It’ll be a place to share best practices, warnings on dubious characters traveling temple to temple; request part time help; and create a support office where we can look for group pricing on things we all need for our temples like insurance, travel and other purchases. We’ll share pdfs for preaching and outreach and general info. All Coming Soon!
It seems all of our temples deal with the issue of unattended and sometimes wild children disrupting the peace and quiet of others coming for a meditative experience. We discussed what to do to better engage the children and how to encourage parents to take responsibility for their children while at the temples
*While all of the topics got input and discussion, there was consensus that these two topics should get our focus and we made strategic plans to start work on them immediately. Committees were formed, action items laid out and some exciting first steps put into motion. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as leaving a meeting with a plan!
All the onsite production was handled by second gen devotees and the temple presidents were all so impressed and appreciative of their sweet service attitude, their capabilities of covering every detail, as well as their input into our discussions. We want to give a special Hari Bol shout out to Ratish from Houston, Bhavin from Baltimore, Arvind from Alachua, and to the world renowned Radha’s Kitchen from Alachua, who cooked the most sumptuous love-filled meals. Everyone was gushing their praises for the excellent care and attention they took of all the attendees.
All in all everyone agreed the meetings were a big success and everyone left feeling uplifted and hopeful for our future.