Our long-term goal is to put the association on a more professional footing while maintaining its public benefit and civic values. The aim is to create a system that incorporates continuous professional development of trainers and flexibility to respond to the needs of learners, and is sustainable and viable in the long term. In consultation with several consultants and with the involvement of the membership and learners, we have mapped out the main directions of the project with a narrower focus in terms of both time and subject. In the area of mobility and cooperation, our main objectives are to 1) strengthen the professional identity, knowledge base and tools of our trainers 2) generate a permanent presence in the international and national training space 3) develop stable and synergetic cooperation with our foreign partners, including operational models 4) respond to the increased number of students and the needs of adult learners in specific subjects
We founded SBK in 2005 with the purpose of teaching classical Japanese budo culture. After a decade, our focus has broadened and we have begun to open new channels while maintaining the value system of budo and its fundamentally experiential methodology. The aim was to give wider and more diverse groups access to the good that can be achieved through regular and conscious movement, community, self-awareness and self-education. This is how the outdoor adventure and dance meditation sections were created. The number of learners as our visibility multiplied and our international network grew. We moved from a closed budo community to a more professional direction. Our content is now much more flexible and varied, but our modus operandi has changed little. While planning this project, we continued to operate in an organisationally friendly way, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails. Our instructors work on an entirely voluntary basis and, as a true non-profit operation, our resources have always and consistently been used to provide training for adult learners. This essentially grassroots, entirely NGO operation has reached the limit of its capacity where it has become a limit to progress. This is why we started BUP.