Abstract

Dear Colleagues,I have served our organization in elected positions for almost eight straight years, and I am happy to be able to write you one last time about the state of our organization before stepping down and taking on the much lighter duties of the Immediate Past Chair. I'm looking forward to sitting under my own vine and fig tree, a moment alone in the shade to reflect on the organization we have made this past year.This period has been characterized by substantial change. After the death of Kent Williamson, long-time NCTE Executive Director, and the interim directorship of Barbara Cambridge, NCTE hired Emily Kirkpatrick as its new Executive Director about a year ago. With virtually no honeymoon period, Emily worked to identify cost savings, improve organizational communications and policies, and modernize the NCTE brand. I look around at how lucky we are to be a conference of NCTE right now, as the CCCC has participated heavily in these strategic decisions. NCTE and CCCC have realized immediate benefits in our shared expenses throughout the organization, and CCCC saw an instant improvement to the bottom line of our convention, as Emily and her team were able to identify tens of thousands of dollars we were wasting in unnecessary convention expenditures. CCCC is also participating in the NCTE content-management, branding, and publishing initiatives. Emily's a mind at work, and I feel confident of CCCC's stability within NCTE's leaner and more responsive structure.A second structural wrinkle we experienced was my predecessor's resignation before his term was up, forcing us to call former Chair Howard Tinberg back into that position for several months last year. Rather than see this period as the world turned upside down, the officers and Executive Committee approached it as a time filled with opportunity-to tighten our belts, to make strategic investments in our members, to reengineer the working culture of the Executive Committee, to convey organizational transparency and accountability to our members, and to continue to reinvent what it means to be a conference.Not Your Father's Executive CommitteeAt its November 2015 retreat, the CCCC Executive Committee took up questions of member participation, organizational transparency, institutional bias, the nature of organizational committees, and the possibility of creating a more active, robust Executive Committee. It is ironic that elected members of the EC reported that they felt disenfranchised in the past, longing for something to be a part of.As a way of building capacity with people of energy and passion, I wanted to foster a sense of reinvention, and I invited the EC to brainstorm new models for imagining our conference and our way of doing things. We began taking steps to become a more active EC, changing from a body that endorses things to a body that acts on things.The 2016 CCCC Officers Team met in Austin in January for its annual retreat and took up this challenge of creating a more open organization and a more engaged EC. We began by considering the previous year's EC task force report on organizational bias and lack of transparency. We felt this report was a great example of what a subcommittee of the EC can accomplish in a short amount of time. The synthesis reflected what we anticipated-that there have been some ambitious and hopeful efforts in the past, but the organization encounters challenges sustaining and completing them. We can see that initiatives without direct action goals risk languishing, and this observation helped us begin crafting initiatives during the year.We identified three challenges we are facing: internal trust, external awareness, and slowness/pace. Many of this year's efforts addressed these three challenges. Internally, we began loosening structures to make CCCC inclusivity visible. We also began new work in maintaining and disseminating the history and good work of committees, task forces, and their charges. …