Date Change for Council's Annual Meeting

The date for the council's annual meeting has been rescheduled for Saturday, May 17, 2008. This change of date avoids Mother's Day weekend as well as S'More Outdoor, the council-wide encampment at Camp Whispering Winds.

This annual meeting will be an important step in the process of our council's realignment. It will be at this meeting that delegates will vote on the blueprint for our new council, which will include things like the vision for the new council, board structure, governance structure and other important items that will provided the foundation for our new council. It will be very important for all the delegates of Santiam Council to attend.

Additional information on the location and time of the annual meeting will be available after the first of the year.

Take Part in Survey for CEO Search

The Council Realignment Committee (CRC) has agreed to conduct a national search to find and hire the CEO for our new council.

As one of the first steps in this process, the CEO search subcommittee needs to identify the necessary criteria for a successful CEO, as well as assist the subcommittee in developing interview questions and topics to discuss with candidates. To help with this, the CEO search subcommittee has created a short survey to gather the views of board members, delegates, operational volunteers, council employees and representatives from the communities served by the council.

Please take a few minutes now to complete this survey and provide us with your feedback. Click here to participate in the online survey. Your feedback is very important to the process.

The deadline to receive the survey results is December 15, 2007.

Q & A

As we move forward in the realignment process, we're sure you will have questions - the size of the new board, the location of the headquarters and other service centers, where the stores will be and many more. We will do our best to answer those questions here. We invite you to submit your questions by clicking here. Look in this section of the Council Realignment Update for answers!

CEO Search to go National

To ensure that our new council has the best person possible as its chief executive officer (CEO), the CRC has elected to conduct a national search to fill this position for our new council. The search sub-committee will have the assistance of a national search firm that works with GSUSA and other Girl Scout councils around the country to recruit and screen candidates for this most important employed position within councils. We anticipate that the search process will begin in January. As more information is available, we will keep you updated.

Proposed New Council Names Forwarded to GSUSA

Many of you took advantage of the opportunity to submit a name or names for our new council. More than 250 girls and adults submitted their suggestions. After reviewing the suggestions, the list was narrowed down to the ones that fell within the GSUSA guidelines. At the CRC meeting this list was reviewed and the final three were selected. These names will now be forwarded to GSUSA where they will go through another review process. At the completion of that process, our CRC will be notified as to the decision regarding the name of our new council and we will announce the name of our new council. Please note that we expect the review process to take several months.
The names that were forwarded on to GSUSA are:

• Heart of the Pacific Northwest
• Oregon and SW Washington
• Pacific Northwest

Thank you to everyone who took part in this process! This is a great first step in bringing together the members of all our councils.

Welcome!

Welcome to our first update for the council realignment process, which began for us on Saturday, October 20, 2007. Representatives from the four councils headquartered in Oregon (Santiam, Columbia River, Western Rives and Winema) as well as from Silver Sage in Boise, ID met in Portland for our first Council Realignment Committee (CRC) meeting. We began the discussions needed to bring the four Oregon-based councils together, along with most of eastern Oregon (currently served by Silver Sage), as one new council.
Each council is allowed four members on the CRC. Santiam Council is represented by the following members:

• Linda Millington, current council president
• Cara Fischer, former council president
• Betty Hart, former council president
• Stephanie Smetana, executive director

Following each future CRC meeting, we will provide you with an update like this one. It will include information on decisions made, feedback needed and questions answered. Look in your email mailbox for them. The next CRC meeting is scheduled for January 12.