Annual Report of the President

August 2005

Over the past year, The Fellowship has continued to deal with a number of administrative issues. Some of these are directly related to our having sold our building in Chicago but most are issues that require our attention regardless of what our physical facilities are like and whether we have such facilities at all.

An Information Technology group, chaired by Steve Dreier, and including a number of volunteers who are IT professionals by day, has been reviewing our data management as well as website related needs, with an eye toward making our systems more secure, properly backed up and better managed.

A more recently formed administrative group comprised of The Fellowship officers as well as Robert Burns & Susan Cook, has held a number of conference calls to discuss issues related to accounting services, website management, administrative procedures, logo usage, and web based Urantia Book sales.

The administrative group decided to move ahead with the formation of a Website Content Team, the purpose of which is to research and analyze our current website and recommend content for a renewed Fellowship website.

The overall objective behind these efforts is not merely an incremental improvement in the way we do our business, although that has already occurred and is likely to continue, but the design of a policy driven administrative and technical infrastructure that is both solid enough and flexible enough to continue to serve us well into the years ahead. The last thing we need is a system that we can live with today but one that will need to be completely reinvented by those who follow us.

We are a mission-driven organization. Everyone involved in the work of The Fellowship is motivated by the desire to spread the Urantia Book and its teachings throughout our planet. Yet all too often we are confronted in our midst with examples of work behavior or work product that would not be tolerated in most businesses or organizations. Now, we can put together some outstanding policies and procedures and design the most elegant and efficient techno/administrative infrastructure on the face of the earth, and we still won’t be where we need to be so long as we continue to tolerate anything less than first rate performance. When all is said and done, we need to recognize that, even more fundamental than our need to improve our system is our need to radically transform our work culture.

Over many months we have explored the possibility of holding a joint IC 08 conference with the IUA. These efforts did not succeed. We recently received an official response from the IUA President indicating that the IUA is not ready for such a joint project.

On a more promising note, over the past several months, I have had two telephone conversations and several email communications with Urantia Foundation president, Seppo Kanerva. These contacts led to a face-to-face meeting between the two of us on campus here at Villanova earlier in the week. The purpose of our meeting was to explore possible areas of cooperation between Urantia Foundation and The Fellowship. We identified a number of areas where cooperation could be advantageous to both organizations and, more importantly, to the entire readership and to the promulgation of the revelation. While it is premature to report any specific progress, I believe that we will continue to communicate and that progress will be made.