Start a Foundation, they said! It will be fun, they said!

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 decided that rather than stubbornly attempting to run on empty while squeezing REPAOF between family and work and personal challenges and life in general, it was far more important to identify priorities so we could align the workload with the skills and resources we had available. This meant making the difficult decision to suspend activities like The Shooting Range and daily interactions on Social Media in favour of taking care of things like relationship building, board education, program development research, and, above all, self-care.

As we prepare for our AGM in June 2024, we have a renewed sense of clarity, which we anticipate will propel our Year Three activities to run more smoothly than our previous approach of naively tackling complex problems with enthusiastic blind optimism. To speak plainly, while it sucked being forced to slow down (and our egos are perhaps a little bruised) our enthusiasm remains stubbornly intact and we look forward to slowly and methodically rolling out plans for the coming year.



Thank you to those who have continued supporting the work and programs and initiatives we have been quietly nurturing - from donations of time and camera equipment to those sharing expertise and connecting us within your networks, we are humbled and grateful, and can't wait to report back with updates on what Year Three has in store.

With kind regards,

The REPAOF Board of Directors

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