Burning out brings benefits

DigitalEve Japan is approaching its second anniversary. The core of women who started the group have expended a lot of energy–sometimes productively planning and executing events, sometimes envisioning a better world and trying to make it happen, sometimes agonising over one particluarly challenging member.
Like most volunteer organizations, DE-J suffers from member apathy and leader burnout. And those of use who’ve been on board the whole time are getting pretty tired. But at this evening’s SC meeting, we renewed our energy with some new ideas that, if we get them off the ground, should make progamming and accomplishing our mission much easier.
We’ve always wanted our members to take on responsibility for their own learning and increase their participation of their own accord, instead of having the SC manage every aspect of every program. Now we are going to advocate small, special interest groups. We’ve put forward the idea a few times before with limited success but this time we’re hoping it will take off because we are cutting back on our SC-initiated programming.
So burnout might bring benefits to the group by encouraging members to participate more and form a stronger community. Which is the best part of DigitalEve Japan, except for that one annoying member.