Dear Tobias, Hope you are well and my apologies for a very slow reply. Over here in Australia it is the beginning of summer as well as the festive season, which makes it a really busy time of year starting from as early as November... everyone tries to get everything done before going on summer holidays! Thank you so much for your update and sharing your activities and difficulties with us. It is wonderful to read you were able to get funding for printing - I would love to hear more about this when you have the time. We have had lots happening at Action for Happiness Australia over the last year. I can definitely see many experiences and difficulties that we've had over the last few years mirrored in your update. Our main difficulty continues to be resourcing - both people and financial - but we have been putting work into a strategy to help us prioritise and focus our activities for the next year or two. We lost one of our key board members (Marketing and Comms specialist) this year, so have just recruited their replacement and will be focussing on building a communications strategy as a priority in the new year. We are also looking at recruiting more volunteers to help the AfHA Board with operations - including admin, courses and events. In terms of other AfHA activities for 2019: - Our annual international day of happiness event continues to be a success. We held it at the University of Melbourne this year, and we are currently working on a new revamped event format for 2020 - We launched an exciting new Happtivist campaign this year with the aim of empowering our followers and supported to become fellow happtivists. Follow @happtivist on instagram to follow our journey - We also had our inaugural Happtivist march in July which coincided with the IPPA conference - see our Facebook page for photos :) Vanessa King from Action for Happiness joined the march which was great! We are planning to make this an annual event. Our board is currently made up of nine members and we meet bi-monthly. We also have an bi-monthly operations meeting on the alternate month. Thanks again for keeping in touch regularly! I really appreciate it - it can be hard to stay in touch with everyone near and far when we are all working at capacity, so really appreciate you taking the initiative. Let me know if you have any particular questions or anything you'd like me to talk about a little more. I saw your meeting request for a Tuesday phone call. Unfortunately Tuesday evenings are quite tricky for me, but I'll see if anyone else can make it and let you know. Otherwise I'm sure we'll find another separate time to chat. All the best for Christmas and the festive season. Zoe & the team at AfHA On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 11:37 PM Tobias Polzin < [email protected]> wrote:
Dear Mark, Alex, national chapters,
I would like to send an update on the last 3 month's activities of Action for Happiness Germany:
- There are now around 10 courses using our translated materials and they all went well, some where really vibrating (Darmstadt had over 30 participants). This is really a contribution that would not have been possible without the work of the translation team! Thanks! There was a course in Nürnberg which was thought to be given in English, but it did not get enough participants. - We printed a new edition (200 books) of course books as we were running empty. There were only minor changes to the last edition. - We translated the AfH postcard and printed 5000 of them. Distribution has not yet started. The online team is thinking of a good way to for the interaction. - We found a volunteer that is eager to do the shipping of books and postcards for us. Really great. - A separate team does very constantly do the translation and review of the successful calender, including posting on facebook and on the website. Thanks! - A new member of the core team is Facebook savvy and started daily postings of quotes, calendar tasks and funny adoptions of the 10 keys into something like "Keep calm and do things for others", ... We have now over 1500 subscriptions. www.facebook.com/actionforhappinessdeutschland - The homepage www.actionforhappiness.de has been enriched with materials. One text on social change, possibilities to contribute, a German version of the "Unhappy?" text, ... - We have been "passed the lamp" from Alex to do the course calls for germany and started translating the "how to become a course leader" and "course guide" to make it possible to make the whole thing available to German course leaders with limited English skills. We are taking over the responsibility for the courses in German speaking countries more and more. - We created monthly newsletters. Again, AfH International supported us with mailings to members in Switzerland and Austria. - All founding applications we did, were rejected. But we were contacted by a foundation and were granted 2000€ for printing of books, postcards and organisational meetings. - In two cities there are regular gatherings. We have translated some of the gathering materials. - We had a weekend with 11 contributors and interested people in Germany for tuning in, connecting, planning and taking action.
Difficulties:
- We invite people to contact us if they want to support, and they do. But except from "organize a course" (and soon "spread the postcards") there is not much we can offer them "out of the box". There is a beautiful plenty of things to do, but they involve a lot of knowledge and sometime skills. So we - mainly I - do a lot phone calls, people are sometimes disappointed, because after a first "hello, would you like to give your course, what are your interested, join our supporter mailinglist" email they have to wait far too long. - As many of our team have a lot of other talks, its really a huddle to arrange appointments. Not to speak about the difficulties in organizing regular tasks (monthly newsletter) or complex tasks (setting up the context management system for all kind of purposes). - We are still invisible for classical media like magazines, radio, TV. We are not experienced in contacting those.
Perhaps you are interested in our basic organisational structure, which has not changed much:
- There is a non-profit association with 3 board members that serves as the legal foundation, but effectively does nothing. - There are now 5 people that committed themselves to participate in the organisation for at least 6 months. There are around 10 others that participate in separate tasks (translating the monthly calendar, ...). We have mailing lists for translators and supporters, but the activity here is rather low. - 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.
Dear national chapters, 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)
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-- Zoe Horzella Action for Happiness Australia - Board Chair