Moving On to the 2016/2017 School Year

L-R: Lianne Campbell and Janice Park, the new co-Presidents of the PW Garden

Now that we're nearing the end of the 2015-2016 school year, it's a bittersweet moment for Haske and myself. We're graduating from Prince of Wales and will be retiring from our positions as co-Presidents of the PW Garden Club, yet we're also extremely excited for what Janice and Lianne, our successors, have in store for next year!

Throughout this past school year, Janice and Lianne have been the first Vice-Presidents of the PW Garden Club to go through a new and extensive training program, the result of a massive behind-the-scenes revamp of the training and succession model employed by the Garden Club, the parent organization of the PW Community Garden.

A garden is only as good as its leaders. Thus, the main, overarching goal Haske and I had while we led the garden this year was to establish a new model of sustainable leadership by establishing a new focus on training and mentorship. Janice and Lianne have been familiarizing themselves with running the garden/club and gaining hands-on leadership experience since the fall of 2015, with guidance, help, feedback and advice from Haske and myself; additionally, there has been a slow, gradual transition of responsibility, meaning that Janice and Lianne have in fact been running the day-to-day minutiae of the garden for awhile now! This new model, which was initiated this year, is starkly different from the conventional approach employed by other clubs at PW, wherein next year's leaders are simply chosen at the end of the year.

The full long-term effects of this revamp (and several smaller, related initiatives, like a Facebook group of the garden's former leaders to act as a resource for current/future leaders (former leaders reading this post and wondering why you're not in the Facebook group: contact the current leaders and we'll add you right in!)) will not be seen until several years down the line. However, the short-term effects of this revamp are already evident, because Janice and Lianne are more than prepared to take over the garden.

At our year-end club celebration/party on June 7th, Haske and myself presented Janice and Lianne with ceremonial nametags as a way to "pass the torch" and officially promote them to co-Presidents of the Prince of Wales Garden Club for the 2016-2017 school year. Their Vice-Presidents, and future co-Presidents for the 2017-2018 school year, Jasmine Fung and Alice Zhang, have also been chosen as well, and will begin their training soon. Haske and I are most definitely a bit sentimental to be leaving, but with successors as accomplished, prepared, and ready as ours -- perhaps the most prepared any newly promoted Garden Club President has been -- we're not the least bit worried to pass on stewardship of the garden, and we're in fact extremely excited for its future under such great leaders, who we're confident will accomplish fantastic things next year!

Cheers,
William Li
President, Prince of Wales Garden Club
(Now Retired)