The Haiku Foundation Survey: Mission Statement

The Haiku Foundation is now in its 4th year of operation, and we’d like your opinion on how we’re doing. We’ll feature one project or area of concentration for the Foundation each week, and would appreciate your candid evaluation of our performance. This week’s topic:

Mission Statement
The impetus behind The Haiku Foundation was the realization that English-language haiku had done a poor job of promoting itself in two important venues: in gathering, interpreting, honoring and making available its comprehensive history, and in reaching beyond a coterie audience to establish its importance as a literary vehicle in the present and future. As a result, THF has two primary missions:

1) to archive our first century of English-language haiku; and

2) to expand possibilities for our second.

All other haiku groups—from journals to societies to conferences—have been created to help the individual poet realize his or her creative dream, be it education, publication or social contact. The Haiku Foundation does not follow this model. THF instead is a series of projects organized not for poets per se, but for haiku itself. The realization of these projects will in due course help all haiku poets. Haiku has been very good to all the poets who have been fortunate to have found it. The Haiku Foundation is where poets go when they want to give back.

Does our mission statement clearly outline our objectives? And how have we done in fulfilling it? Please leave your comments in the response box below, and the Foundation’s Board of Directors will take your replies into consideration at our next monthly meeting. Thanks for helping us better serve you!