Start a Foundation, they said! It will be fun, they said!
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Welcome to Setting up a Foundation 101 at the school of Doing Things the Hard Way. There are few things as humbling as coming up with a million great ideas and not being able to execute them the way they had been envisioned. After the Foundation ending Year One on a high with a presentation of "Bob's Funeral" at the Lightchasers Conference in Pincher Creek, Alberta in spring 2023, by late summer we realized our lofty Year Two goals had us on a path to self-destruction. Having zero experience running a Foundation meant the Board Members were all on a steep learning curve. We hadn't known of (let alone could we have predicted) the multitude of roadblocks we'd face building up our programming, and, like so many others before us, we made the mistake of trying to take on way too much, way too soon, with way too few people. It led to burn-out and accomplishing only a handful of the things we had intended to... and we crashed. Hard. Humbling outcomes aside, the Board de