Shared Visioning Campaign

Dear TBT Family,

Your temple leaders are planning for our congregation’s future, and we need your help. A few weeks ago, interim Senior Rabbi Art Nemitoff spoke about shared visioning. If you’d like to hear his remarks, you can watch a recording of the Friday service below.
 
Would you please consider being part of our future visioning project?
 
Temple B’nai Torah has been a Reform congregation for just over 50 years, and we’ve been in Bellevue for 25. It’s time to do some thinking about our future. In May, the community voted to take the next steps toward building an Early Childhood Center. What else do we want to do to keep TBT the temple we want and need – for us, our families, and our community?
 
This summer and early fall, a group of members will be reaching out to TBT members to ask them to sit down for a 30- to 60-minute chat to talk about your hopes for TBT, to learn more about what brought you to our community and what has kept you here. What are your priorities for your spiritual and communal life? We also will bring together some small groups to talk about TBT and eventually will send out a written survey.

Shared visioning is much more than a listening campaign. We will be listening, but our goal is to gather and express our communal beliefs about who we are, what is important to us, and where we want to go from here. We’ll use this information to decide what programming, services, staffing, and rabbinic leadership are right for TBT.
 
We’re not going to ask if you prefer potlucks over catered dinners or if the sanctuary is too cold, or what you think of the instructional signs near the recycling and compost bins. We want to go a bit deeper and so we’re starting with intimate conversations. 
 
All the information will be compiled into one anonymous summary document to be shared with the congregation. We will tell you what we learned and ask for your feedback again to make sure we have reached a shared understanding. Then the temple board can make their decisions about our future based on your communal priorities. 
 
This is important: Everything you say will be entirely confidential. Only the interviewers will know what any individual says; they will share their “data” in a way that does not reveal who said what. The people called for these initial interviews are being selected at random in a way that also reflects the breadth of our community by age, gender, background, and a few other aspects, like marital status, how long you’ve been a TBT member, whether you’re a parent, etc. 
 
We know some people will REALLY want to be involved in this process, and others will be less enthusiastic. If you do not get a call and would like to participate, please email me, and I will add you to the list. If you do get a call, please try your best to participate. We’ll meet you where you are: in person (preferably) or on Zoom. The person you talk to will not be your best friend and could be someone you’ve never met. This is by design. But we hope the process will not only help us gather information but also build some new connections. 
 
If you have questions, please email me. If you think you would like to help in another way, let me know that as well. More volunteers are needed for different parts of the process. 
 
We want to hear from as many of you as possible because your voices together make up Temple B’nai Torah. Thank you for being a member of our community and for being willing to share your thoughts and dreams.

Sincerely,
Donna Blankinship