Pam’s Pictorama Post: January is a tough month for me. Personal ghosts swirl around me a bit this time of the year, with a strong dash of snow, sleet and extreme cold thrown into the misery mix. This year is no exception, but today I will focus on another anniversary and update those readers who are interested on my new job which also hit the one year mark last week.

I have been known to say that the thing about accepting a challenge is there’s always the very real chance you will fail – that is if it is a true challenge. Obviously we gauge our chance for success when we accept and enter into challenges, but really, a true challenge means that the specter of failure should remain front of mind.

I wrote at the one year point in my job at Jazz at Lincoln Center after leaving the Metropolitan Museum after almost 30 years. (Those separate posts can be found here and here.) I definitely had a tiger by the tail at that point and with that job. It was more than another year before I started to feel like I had it on the run and it took a pandemic to make me feel as though I really gained some ground. (One of the posts I wrote about the challenges of managing my team remotely during Covid can be found here.)

The learning curve at Jazz was tremendous and the first year was just about immersing myself in the life of the orchestra, traveling with them and understanding them as well as establishing routines and process.

While the new gig at a large non-profit veterinary hospital is remarkably less dysfunctional, the challenge of breaking the code of the organization and fundraising for it may be an even higher bar. My biggest challenge is the difficulty of immersing myself in the life of the hospital. My office is not physically in the hospital and therefore I am only present when needed. Finding your way into a complex organization is hard enough but to do it from a distance is of course even harder.

When I talk about success and failure, of course first and foremost is actually raising money and creating a dependable functioning machine for doing so. More science than art, a good fundraising operation should understand how and from where it gets money so that it is achievable each year, and that forms a foundation on which growth of contributed income can be based.

It is this latter piece I have not yet achieved. As I hit the one year mark I feel as though I barely know the organization and that I have yet to build even the shell of a machine, instead I have taken the year to study the existing process and procedures. I am sorry not to be further along, but remind myself that I signed up for a marathon and not a sprint and how can you improve on things if you do not understand precisely how they work.

And while I have not cracked the code I did meet more of the medical staff over the holidays and I need to take advantage of offers to spend time in some of the services – a day in Surgery, in the ER and maybe an overnight in the hospital. There were offers of meetings and coffee and part of my New Year’s resolutions for the job has to be a regular schedule of these.

Still and most importantly, taking it out of the abstract, some of you know that Blackie decided to stop eating in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. He did a long stint at the hospital about two years ago and recently we started bringing him there to care for his diabetes. (Posts about both of these Blackie events can be found here and here.) Despite setbacks in does still feel like I am in the right place at the right time for me.

For some things there are no real solutions aside from time and hard work and so here we go.