When the La Ceiba team first committed to completing our mission statement, I unwisely assumed that a group of 11 people who are all dedicated to the same project and share the same ideal of improving the lives of impoverished Honduran women in their families through a holisitic MFI would easily be able to put their sentiment in words. It “just” had to express what we were trying to do. I was, therefore, completely taken aback at the amount of time we spent crafting our mission from start to finish… the hours spent brainstorming, drafting, agreeing, then deleting and starting over again. Working on the mission statement has helped us to examine our motivations and goals. Perhaps that is why it ended up being one of the most difficult tasks to complete. When everyone cares about what we’re doing, but in slightly different ways, for slightly different reasons, it can be difficult to figure out exactly what everyone has in common and what we want the world to understand about why we’re here and what we’re trying to do.
When we first decided to tackle the mission statement we all met at a local coffee shop and wrote down what we thought were important concepts to include. We talked about our personal motivations for taking part in the project and we discussed the importance of including enough specifics to make us stand out, but leaving enough openings to ensure that we could grow with time and experience on the ground. We didn’t want to be restricted to a definition of La Ceiba that would prevent us branching out beyond microfinance, beyond Siete and Villa, or extending loans to other types of individuals than the ones we’ve initially identified as our target group. However, finding that balance proved difficult.We quickly realized that the slightest change in word choice, style or phrasing could alter the whole message we were sending. We also found, after several fruitless attempts, that working on a sentence as a large group frequently meant starting with something somewhat acceptable, then modifying it to death, reaching a point where there was no fire, no clear goal, and little to recommend the final statement. We’d try to keep it broad, include everyone’s favorite expressions, and somehow we’d find ourselves with something that had very little to do with the reasons we started La Ceiba in the first place, and a mission that wouldn’t reach out to the people we were trying to speak to.
Having acknowledged that repeated efforts in the vein of large group cooperation had proved relatively unsuccessful, we tried splitting the group up into 3 and each segment worked on a different part of our goals. It was during the initial split that our default policy was finally resolved, so things began to take a turn for the better, or at least I believe they did, once we stepped outside of the 11 person setting and broke it down into 3s and 4s. In smaller groups there were less competing ideologies. One important part of how it was divided, however, was that each group included a representative of each of the ideologies involved in the debates we’d been having in class. Like-minded individuals were separated, and we were to try to work together and convince each other, hopefully reaching a group opinion that took all views into account.
In the end, while this led to a more defined direction for the statement, we were still unable to find something we were satisfied with committing to in the long run. David and Megan were tasked with collaborating on a final sentence for the rest of the group to vote on. They brought their ideas back to the group, and after some last minute modifications, the mission statement was decided upon. La Ceiba’s mission statement will be, as other posters have listed:
La Ceiba envisions a world in which every individual can realize their potential through hard work. As a microfinance program that provides financial, social and educational support, La Ceiba empowers struggling Hondurans to overcome the inequalities that have denied them this right.
It contains the key concepts that all of the members believe in, and it speaks to both our long term and short term goals. While I might wish it had a little more action to it, it really allows us a lot of flexibility, and I believe that our vision can make up for the sense of activity and spirit that may be hard to grasp in the mission statement. A young, growing, and changing organization, La Ceiba’s mission statement will introduce people to the ideals that drive us and help to give focus to our long term plans. I’m so glad that consensus has been achieved. Now La Ceiba can advance with a clear direction provided by the definition we’ve established for who we are and why we’re doing all of this in the first place.