I look at achieving goals as a house with many stories. Our ceiling becomes our floor each story we go up. In the case of SMART, our goals are our ceilings and our achievements are our floors. Every goal we achieve becomes the ground we stand on to reach our next goal. Although we have accomplished so much, we still have many stories to climb to make our program that much better. That’s why we’re not going to stop where we are at. Let me tell you a little bit about where we plan on going from here.
In order to get attendees to feel comfortable and open up about their issues so that they can receive the best help they can get and apply it– we want to make sure that they never feel alone. Besides coming in with a positive attitude and talking to attendees after meetings, we hope to get members talking to each other on a regular basis. Five or so minutes after the meeting may not be enough time to get to know one another. So, social activities for members seems like the next logical step. SMART San Diego hopes to put together social activities where members can become friendly with one another to offer support and help each other progress during this challenging time.
Yet, in SMART, we know our facilitators are just as important as our attendees. We hope to start social activities for them as well. This is in hopes that they too can become friendly with one another, so if one ever needed a sit-in facilitator or advice they could have someone to go to. Also, facilitator input is so important to the program. That’s why we are striving to transfer more decision making to facilitators via our new board of directors. Yet, our goals include keeping the facilitators working hard, too. We want to keep increasing donations and handbook sales to send to the central office. Lastly, we want to always keep improving our knowledge and skills at leading SMART meetings.
In order to keep increasing the size of our meetings, we want to find new and innovative ways to advertise them, so that it can be accessible to anyone who is looking for an alternative to a 12-step program. One of the ideas we have is to educate local professionals about SMART’s meetings. They would then pass on SMART to anyone who they felt would be in need, as well as to their coworkers who too could spread the word. Also, we want to keep improving our new San Diego SMART website, so that it may easily direct someone to any type of resource they would need to participate in a meeting or assist in their recovery. In addition, we’d like to increase our community partnerships, such as with the VA hospital, in hopes that this collaboration will provide SMART’s techniques to more people who need them. By promoting SMART in this way, not only do we gain attendees, but also new facilitators.
Our main goal is that we will keep growing at a sustainable pace in our number of attendees, facilitators, and meetings. Hopefully all of the above will play a part in the latter. Yet, this is not an exhaustible list of goals. If we reach all of the abovementioned, then these achievements will provide the foundation for our upcoming goals. We hope to build a house with many floors and ceilings, in order to make SMART San Diego available to all having difficulties with addiction and looking for a solution.
Thank you.