Dear national chapters,

I was just writing an email to Mark with a some update with our last 3 month's activities and I thought, perhaps you would also be interested in it.

I would like to share some personal feelings about our local chapter work, too. In general, things feel more difficult for us compared to last year. The first year was so exciting. The preparation of the translated course was a hard, but clear task. Now that we have done that, it's not so clear how to proceed, given the limited time resources of volunteers who are full-time employed with other jobs. So, we focussed our work for the next 3 month on the following areas:

1. Courses. Approach all people that have said they are interested in leading a course (hopefully using a mailing from AfH International database)
   
2. Prepartion of a gathering weekend for Action for Happiness Germany. We hope that this can be an activity that can attract new volunteers, give them a non-internet contact with us, qualify them for tasks and clarify the further directions of AfH-Germany. nspired by something that Maurizia from AfH-Italy did, we would like to offer a "preparation for being a course leader" to people who registered as leaders in your database.
3. Improve on organisational questions
1. What can we offer people wanting to volunteer, without the ability to make individual training?
2. For what activities does it make sense to pay for them, as they are not done regular enough and/or powerful enough if done on a volunteer basis?
3. Apply for funds that offer consultancy for non-profit organisations
4. Use positive psychology approaches (character strength analysis) within our own group
   

Unfortunately, a very valuable point, articles in Happiness magazines had to be dropped due to limited resources.

Perhaps our current working procedure is on interest for you:

• There is a non-profit association with 3 board members that serves as the legal foundation, but effectively does nothing.
• There are 3 people that committed themselves to participate in the organisation for at least 6 months. There are around 10 others that participate in isolated tasks (translating the monthly calendar, ...).
• Every 6 months, we arrange a real world weekend together, for revitalising the contact.
• Every 3 months, we do a session of review (our past activities, to celebrate), retrospective (what has to be changed in our processes) and planning (what is the focus of the next 3 months) (adopted from Scrum methodology)
  
• Every week, we have a 20 minutes zoom webcall with "one good thing", "current mood", "celebrate AfH tasks done in the last week", "plans for next week", "impediments/difficulties/questions" (adopted from Scrum "daily"), with up to 5 members.
  

After the last "review" I was impressed what we have achieved the last 3 months, although things did not feel very "fluid":

• 3 successful courses supported
• 6 courses in preparation
• The homepage www.actionforhappiness.de has a new "contribute" page, a page with the german course material for participants. We prepared a German version of the "Unhappy?" text, giving pointers to support organisations in Germany.
• Printed the German course book with fully revised German "resources" (personally, this was my highlight! the printed german books are so well received, look so cool, and the gathering of German links/books/videos for the resources was fun)
  
• Together with AfH International we are experimenting about how to arrange the organisational work for courses in Germany
  
• The homepage was equipped with a feature rich CRM (CiviCRM) used by over 11000 non profit organisations. It offers many interesting options (member database, mailings, event applications, management of donations, ...). But is also so feature rich that it's using sledgehammer to crack a nuts.
  
• AfH Internaional supported us with mailings to members in Switzerland and Austria (with surprisingly no responses)
• We started collected emailadresses of supporters and have around 200.
• Facebook subscriptions and likes are now over 1000.
  
• One request for funding / organisational consultancy was rejected, a second one was submitted, a third one is in preparation.
  
• We found two new people interested in translating materials.

Is there anything to report from you? I would find it nice, if you all report something about your current achievements, difficulties, feelings, plans!

Best wishes

  Tobias

-- 
Ich werde versuchen, mehr Glück und weniger Unglück in der Welt um mich herum zu stiften.
(Action for Happiness Deutschland. www.actionforhappiness.de)