Retreat Planning Assessment by Carlo

Sups, JUFRAN? It's Carlo, the current Educational Development Officer for LFS. First of all I'd like to say how happy and excited I am for all of you participating in this program. It's only been... 3 weeks now? and it seems like a lot of you are getting to know each other pretty well and having lots of fun. I'm glad to hear & read that many of you had a good time at retreat.

I would like to share my concerns about the planning meeting last Friday as I was not able to assess with you all. Now Jack gave a pretty thorough post about what we both discussed so I won't try to repeat what's already been said.

I liked the idea of having the JUFRANians experiencing what an LFS General Assembly meeting is like. However from my understanding the workshop that day was supposed to be done by PEP, who had to cancel last minute. Now this is not the fault of the coordinators by any means, but I found it odd that the original workshop was replaced with a retreat-planning meeting for retreat which was to begin three hours after. This bothered me because suppose the PEP workshop had happened. Would there have been a plan for the retreat at all?

Also, as Jack and Paul had pointed out, the planning meeting became quite chaotic. I don't want anyone to have the impression that that's how LFS General Assembly meetings are like. You can ask Paul, Faye, Moo, KC, and Ruben about all of that. But we learn from our mistakes and this is why we have these assessments. Perhaps later in the semester if there's another planning session, we can run one that's more disciplined and efficient. You can also check out what LFS GA meetings are like Monday's at 7pm in BH 252.

As far as the retreat itself, I wasn't there but I've heard a lot of positive things from the coordinators and the JUFRAN interns. I would've liked to see more educational discussions and guided activities. The purpose should've been not only to have fun and bond with other folks, but to also introduce the politics of LFS to the JUFRANians. You can have fun and get work done at the same time. It just takes planning just as Faye pointed out.

Anyway that's about it. Everything else has pretty much been said. You folks are all awesome. I'll see you all soon, you awesome folks. AWESOME!

-- Carlo