Greetings!

Got a minute? Because the Chaska Historical Society needs YOUR ideas.

Why? Because we’re ready to take the next steps in our journey as an organization. After 43 years, we—our ALL-VOLUNTEER group—have met some pretty impressive goals: a place to call home, an organized collection—including an up-to-date digital solution to our archiving needs, and HUGE publishing projects under our belts. We’ve featured regular, educational, interactive exhibits for the community at no charge. We’ve presented to many groups of students, older adults, and families. We’ve offered free community historical research to individuals, groups, and the City, and more.

It's worth feeling good about. YOU—through your membership and other contributions, through your involvement as a volunteer, through your purchases at the center’s store or website page—YOU have made a difference! Thank you!

We’re now poised to try new things that will broaden our impact, build our community, and sustain our organization. We can follow our vision and mission to meet people where they’re at and get them involved in creating the next chapter of our community’s history.

As a board, we revisited our vision and mission statements. We looked at how we can broaden our work in the Chaska community to ensure that ALL people in the community feel the sense of Chaska’s rich history and connections, and know that they are a part of it. Not just those born here, but the thousands more who have moved here since 1950, whose ideas and contributions have built on the foundation of our community, working together to make Chaska an even better place.

As a board, we decided that our inspiring vision for Chaska’s future is reflected in this statement:

We see a Chaska community where all are valued.

We feel that this statement allows us to focus our historical energies where they really matter: In making Chaska a supportive, inclusive community for all.

The board followed this vision statement with a mission statement that reflects our unique placement to ensure that our local, recorded history reaches and includes the voices of a large portion of the community for the future:

We’re connecting Chaskans to their history in a way that’s accessible and relevant.

With these statements in place to guide us, we were able to set our objectives—our organizational goals—for the next six years (until 2030):

1. By 2030, we will increase our connections to Chaska youth and adults so that 1,000 people in each group will have some contact with Chaska history programming each year.

2. By 2030, we will design a comprehensive and sustainable local historical information gathering system to ensure we have contemporary collecting for the future.

3. By 2030, we will create, maintain, and expand a successful volunteer recruiting and retention plan so that the number of volunteers choosing to contribute rises from ~30 to ~50.

4. By 2030, we will partner with ten organizations to research their history for sharing with the community.

5. By 2030, we will have enough funds in our Community Foundation accounts to sustain, through their earnings, two part-time staff positions (executive director and collections manager) for organization sustainability and stability.

Feeling inspired to help us figure out how to reach these goals?

As a member of the historical society, YOUR ideas on how to best reach them strategically are important! What ideas do you have about strategies for meeting those objectives? What kinds of tasks should the historical society be focusing on that will help us achieve those goals? How do you think we can get there?

Please send me an email at Lisa@Chaskahistory.org with your suggestions by January 30^th, and I’ll bring them to the Board for consideration at our next planning meetings. Please provide a phone number and a good time to call you so that I can connect if I need any clarifications.

Also, if seeing some of these things come to life inspires you to become more involved as a volunteer, please let me know so that I can send you an application and an invitation to our all-volunteer retreat on March 15^th from 9-3.

I look forward to reading your ideas on how we can, collectively, continue to make a difference in our community!

Kind regards,
Lisa Oberski, President

Chaska Historical Society

Lisa@ChaskaHistory.org