Reaching Out Year 2 - 2007

Dear Vestry Members, Bishop's Committee Members, and Parochial Clergy:

This mailing is the first of the Reaching Out Budget process for budget year 2007. It will detail the procedure by which you will receive and respond to Reaching Out Budget information and direct your apportionment allocation to the Reaching Out ministries.

This second year of incorporating the Reaching Out budget as part of the entire diocesan budget includes some refinements that grew out of the 2006 budget process.

One significant development is the way in which information will come to you. For each of the 18 ministries that you will consider, several items have been posted to the website:

A mission statement
A short narrative about the ministry
A planning model chart in which ministries detail the activities they will undertake in 2007 and anticipated results from those ministries
A detailed budget request
The 2005 department report from each ministry

In addition to being posted to the website, this information will be e-mailed to you at the rate of one ministry a day for 18 consecutive business days. You will have received all the information no later than August 15. This will give vestries and bishop's committees the time needed to discuss the budget at their September and October vestry/bishop's committee meetings as well as to attend a workshop prior to the deadline for submitting allocations of November 1.

We strongly suggest that you print out all of the information so that you can read it and consider it carefully.

We have moved to this form of communication because, based on feedback following the 2006 Reaching Out Budget process, the printed booklet that was mailed to all vestry/bishops' committee members last year was not well read. We hope that sending information one ministry at a time will increase readership. This method is also very cost-efficient.

Our e-mail list is derived from the information on church officers given to the diocesan office earlier this year. If we have your e-mail address, you will receive a confirmation e-mail that you must reply to. If you do not receive this e-mailing by July 14, you must go to http://www.council-dwtx.org and sign up to receive future e-mailings.

As an alternative, you may retrieve all of the information directly from the website beginning July 19.

A second significant development is a growing emphasis on accountability. Each ministry has submitted a planning model that sets forth its activities, who is involved in and benefits from these activities, and what the ministry hopes to accomplish through these activities. At the end of 2007, hoped-for results will be compared to actual results.

Many ministries had created the same planning model for 2006 and will begin to compare anticipated outcomes to actual outcomes at the end of this year. The first requirement that this be done is for budget year 2007. While this may seem to be long in coming, please remember that we are looking at budgets in considerable new light.