Reflection on first year as chair

As I reflect upon my first year as Chairman of the Brookings County Board of Directors, I am amazed at the major changes that occurred within this year. When I entered into the Chairman position, I knew there was going to be added stress because we were taking in an additional 6 counties. This is [...]

Update from the Brookings County Chapter Chair

In my last blog post, I wrote about how I was faced with a disaster response situation – and I’m not disaster trained. That opened up my eyes to the fact that I needed to expand my involvement in our organization. So last month, I attended my first disaster class, “Fulfilling Our Mission.” Not only [...]

A taste of disaster response

A week ago this Friday, I woke up and expected to conduct five normal interviews with my executive director (Pat) to hire an office manager for the Watertown office. However, the day turned into much more. The first interview went fine and I just thought I was in for a long day. The second candidate [...]

Challenges and progress

My chapter is hiring a new office manager for our second office in Watertown. We just took charge in July and we are already switching staff! Our effort to find the right person the first time around didn’t work out; however, we have quite a few resumes that have come in and I’m confident we [...]

Campus Connections

Earlier this month, a group of students from the South Dakota State University “Introduction to Nonprofits” class held a pancake feed on our behalf. I have been pushing for a campus event since I went on the Service Area Resource Council as youth liaison in 2006 and I was so excited that we finally made [...]

Over my head in budget issues

At age 24, Jessica Mueller serves as chairwoman of her local Red Cross chapter board. This post is a new installment in a series that chronicles the challenges and successes of her first year on the job. These past few weeks have been a learning experience. For example, I filled out our chapter performance plan [...]

New experiences, new lessons

As I have become more comfortable with my chairman position, a lot has been happening around the office.  Being only 24, I have not had a lot of experience in hiring others, although I was in charge of the search committee to hire our current executive director.  In the past three months I have been [...]

Update from the chairman (in Brookings County)

This is an installment in an ongoing series as Jessica Mueller (age 24) chronicles her experiences as the new chairman of her chapter’s Board of Directors. Today marks my first “official” day as chairman of the Brookings County Chapter Board of Directors.  I had expected to just start my duties today but our chairman was [...]

South Dakota update: chapter expansion

As of July 1st my chapter will be expanding by 6 counties, taking over operations of a CSDU that spans all the way to the North Dakota border.  What’s more, this is all occurring as I am being elected chairman of the board of directors.  All I can say is bring it on!  And am [...]

Closer to Expansion – Update from South Dakota

I apologize for my absence. Activity on my board has been slow until last week when we started rolling again. We are one step closer to expanding our chapter by eight counties! Last week the expansion committee had a conference call with our CSM and laid out what we would like to see happen if [...]