Helping develop and facilitate retreats is somewhat of a specialty of mine. I have found that having at least one regular retreat per year is indispensable for grassroots groups. Since grassroots groups are typically all volunteer run or very short staffed, it is hard to lay foundational structure for your work, strategize and assess your work in deep ways, and create solid work plans to achieve your goals in relatively short, often once a month membership meetings. 

Taking the time to be together for a whole day or several days can achieve the following:

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• A clear mission and vision

• 6 month, yearly, and three-five year goals, and clear work plans to achieve them

• Clear decision making processes and procedures

• Membership processes and outreach plans

• Time to deeply strategize and philosophize about your work, and learn new organizing skills and analysis

• Campaign planning

• Time to educate yourself on historical movements and current movements/initiatives to ally you group with

       …and much, much more

 

As a retreat support person, I can either help facilitate an already formed and fleshed out agenda that your group has made, or I can help with the agenda creation processes. Helping with the agenda creating process may combine with coaching support as well, as your group may want help analyzing what your needs are. Even with an already fleshed out agenda, I will offer different tools and suggestions on ways to move forward with gathering information, ideas and creating action plans. Regardless of how much agenda support I offer, before any facilitation happens I work to understand the dynamic of your group, what projects you are currently working on, and what your needs are. 

 

I have many tricks and tools that can help groups with brainstorming, group assessment, synthesis of ideas and information, campaign strategy, group decision-making, conflict transformation, and more.

 

A suggested donation for retreat support is typically $0-300, depending on the size of the group, how much pre-planning is needed, and how long of a session is needed.