JEFF GOEBEL

Coming in the Back Door— Transitioning a Soil and Water Conservation District to Holistic Financial Planning

BY JEFF GOEBEL

Over the 36 years since I first learned about holistic decision-making, I have had many opportunities to successfully use the Holistic Financial Planning process to move clients toward desirable holistic outcomes. A couple of those experiences included a family with four ranches in Texas and Hawaii, where in the course of three years, using the process I was able to help them improve their financial situation by over $2 million annually while attaining the complex social and ecological values.

Another opportunity was when I worked with a large, complex American Indian tribe, where within two years we were able to use the process to double land management at a high cultural and ecological standard while cutting a $1 million out of a $17 million budget. The following year, I facilitated the use of the Holistic Financial Planning process at the request of the tribal business council where we were able to significantly cut costs of operating the government’s 250 programs without cutting staff or salaries and having the budget done three months early. This is the power of the process.

Hometown Opportunities

Three years ago, I moved to Valencia County, New Mexico and bought a small farm. One of my life’s dreams was to serve on a local Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD). It just so happened that a board member position was open so I was appointed, then elected by the community to serve. I have made recommendations to our board of volunteers and, slowly, they are being adopted.

I noticed that our financial planning process was merely checking how we spent money the previous month and making sure everything was authorized appropriately. We were basically managing our financial resources by “looking in the rear view mirror, checking what we had already driven by,” instead of also looking to the future for where we wanted to go. Our annual budgeting process was not well facilitated. We recently were able to jump the income significantly by getting community support for a mil levy, which also requires that we show accountability to managing the funds responsibly.

I was frustrated by the monthly financial reports because it didn’t really tell how our spending matched our plan, was our plan holistically goal driven so that we made decisions that were socially, economically, and ecologically sound simultaneously, and how were we managing our cash flow. I expressed my concern and said there was a better way. There was positive support, though only in words, not action. Finally, last summer, I was able to piece together the financial statements and shared with the board that we were heading for a financial wreck! By mid-2018 we would be out of money! I offered again to share the Holistic Financial Planning process and this time the words turned to action.

Since the board is comprised of volunteers who have other things they do with their lives beyond serving on the board, getting trained to new processes is difficult to do. Without a lot of background information about holistic decisionmaking, I needed to make the transition simple, safe, and understandable. We have developed a rudimentary holistic goal (context), however, some of the board members don’t really see the value in the holistic goal (context). Some feel that we don’t need complicated processes to make decisions, so moving forward with this process required thinking very clearly about how to be successful and keep it simple.

Keep It Simple

The first thing that we have done is to identify the “enterprises” where our board is spending money and time. The District Manager has a good handle on the current accounting process and a willingness to do this process so the transition is moving well. Next, we populated the 2017–18 spreadsheet with what we agreed in our budget at the beginning of our fiscal year (July–June). These are our planned income and expenses. Next, we are populating the spreadsheet with actuals by month. We will also automate the difference by month and the cumulative difference by year.

This is our first steps toward moving toward holistic decision-making. We are using the tool to create awareness about our financial management process and what we can do about this to be successful as a board. The next steps will include using the spreadsheet and especially the control sheet for the rest of our fiscal year. We had a financial planning board meeting in January to evaluate the mid-year financial situation. We will also make adjustments as we finish the year and build our new budget.

This process is already allowing us to identify our financial weak link, which is handling capacity. There are many grant opportunities to do work that we want to do and aren’t currently doing, yet we don’t have the staffing to obtain nor manage new funding and projects. I will be able to guide “testing” toward the holistic goal so the board can get a better idea about how we make our decisions and what is the “right” investments to make in the SWCD.

In addition to working with the Financial Management task force, I am also leading the Land Use Plan. This is another opportunity to practice holistic decision-making at the conservation district board level, though the action to do this has been slow. We are now picking up steam as we begin doing GIS analysis.

An interesting pattern showed up when we first initiated the Land Use Planning two years ago. We brainstormed all of the resource concerns (natural resource problems) in the District. The previous Land Use Plan, called a Long Range Plan back in 1997, had exactly the same resource concerns we have now. In other words, we didn’t solve any of the problems from 20 years ago.

I have rearranged the resource concerns into where they fit in the holistic decision making framework. The new table of contents and body of the document uses the framework to guide decision making. We are making great progress now with this new approach and will be able to tie the two processes (financial planning and using the Land Use Plan through the holistic framework) together to allow us to make better decisions holistically.

We are using the Land Use Plan to develop policy that supports a holistic plan for conservation in Valencia SWCD, which is all of Valencia County and parts of three others. Two pueblos, Laguna and Isleta, are in the SWCD boundaries as well. We have already used policy analysis with state-wide conservation district resolutions, which allowed us to realize the need for a Soil Health resolution for New Mexico. We passed the state-wide soil health