Intro fellowship facilitator → run a social → committee member
Seems like you could let someone run a social essentially straight off, as it’s pretty hard to mess up a social.
That said, I agree with your core point, it’s important to provide people exciting opportunities when they’re most enthusiastic:
This takes time and there’s dropout at every stage. The observation is that organisers are usually the most motivated after a retreat/conference/...
That said, your ideas for sessions all sound really useful:
Some ideas for sessions: how to 1-1s, facilitation training, mental health, pitches for EA short and long, people management & project delegation, Personal productivity, Effective planning, Movement building strategy and strategic prioritization for groups, creating positive epistemic norms, “Agenticness” (as explained in my post), how to trade money for time
I guess my main skepticism is the following:
This seems doubly useful since other organisers seldom have time to skill up new organisers
It seems like there is a lot of effort in running a retreat and that this would likely involve multiple people, so I don’t see you coming out ahead here. That said, I expect you’d end up with more highly trained organizers at the end of this both because of increased amount of training time for each organizer and from the peer-to-peer exchange of ideas.
I agree you could let someone run a social straight off. In general I guess people are more likely to agree to running a social if they are already a fellowship facilitator (fellowship social), and more likely to agree to become a committee member if they are already organising socials. The whole idea of moving people down a funnel etc.
To your skepticism: Thanks for raising the point! It’s true that if we had perfect organiser training either locally in the groups or in one big bootcamp, it’s unclear the bootcamp would cost less organiser hours. However organisers locally often don’t have the time/skills to train new organisers. So the comparison probs isn’t decisive. Hope that makes sense!
Background: I’m running two retreats this week whilst working with Swarthmore College EA. Both retreats are along the lines of what you described as a bootcamp (“where newer organisers, facilitators & similar are skilled up and gain lots of motivation from interacting with others in-person”), but for ~18 people. I think talking together about this sounds promising!
I agree with your response to casebash:
It’s true that if we had perfect organiser training either locally in the groups or in one big bootcamp, it’s unclear the bootcamp would cost less organiser hours. However organisers locally often don’t have the time/skills to train new organisers. So the comparison probs isn’t decisive.
How are you thinking about the intended ‘quality’ (broadly defined, somewhat similar to production value) of the proposed bootcamp, relative to: the quality of generic EA retreats, the retreat mentioned in your post, or a larger event like Icecone? I’d love more details on this.
Seems like you could let someone run a social essentially straight off, as it’s pretty hard to mess up a social.
That said, I agree with your core point, it’s important to provide people exciting opportunities when they’re most enthusiastic:
That said, your ideas for sessions all sound really useful:
I guess my main skepticism is the following:
It seems like there is a lot of effort in running a retreat and that this would likely involve multiple people, so I don’t see you coming out ahead here. That said, I expect you’d end up with more highly trained organizers at the end of this both because of increased amount of training time for each organizer and from the peer-to-peer exchange of ideas.
I agree you could let someone run a social straight off. In general I guess people are more likely to agree to running a social if they are already a fellowship facilitator (fellowship social), and more likely to agree to become a committee member if they are already organising socials. The whole idea of moving people down a funnel etc.
To your skepticism: Thanks for raising the point! It’s true that if we had perfect organiser training either locally in the groups or in one big bootcamp, it’s unclear the bootcamp would cost less organiser hours. However organisers locally often don’t have the time/skills to train new organisers. So the comparison probs isn’t decisive. Hope that makes sense!
I guess that makes sense.
I suppose organising such a bootcamp is probably one of the most useful things that national level organisers could be doing.
Background: I’m running two retreats this week whilst working with Swarthmore College EA. Both retreats are along the lines of what you described as a bootcamp (“where newer organisers, facilitators & similar are skilled up and gain lots of motivation from interacting with others in-person”), but for ~18 people. I think talking together about this sounds promising!
I agree with your response to casebash:
How are you thinking about the intended ‘quality’ (broadly defined, somewhat similar to production value) of the proposed bootcamp, relative to: the quality of generic EA retreats, the retreat mentioned in your post, or a larger event like Icecone? I’d love more details on this.
Ah, super exciting! I’ll DM you