Thanks for asking! The pitch goes something like this:
Uni groups are constrained by their organisers’ time. The typical way of getting a new organiser is to find an excited EA and to slowly give them more and more responsibilities (e.g. intro fellowship facilitator → run a social → committee member). This takes time and there’s dropout at every stage. The observation is that organisers are usually the most motivated after a retreat/conference/… So we might be able to significantly speed up this process and reduce dropout by having a retreat-ish thing early on. Several group organisers have already recognised this and have sent newer members to these things. There seems to be high value in running something specifically aimed at people in the early stages of organising.
So I propose to run a “bootcamp”, where newer organisers, facilitators & similar are skilled up and gain lots of motivation from interacting with others in-person. This seems doubly useful since other organisers seldom have time to skill up new organisers and few new organisers would read into CB resources on their own (especially if they are not yet highly excited about CB).
I’m imagining something like 30 −40 people, 3 nights, with learning and upskilling sessions and ample opportunities to socialise with other participants.
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
Some more thoughts:
We will still need a good amount of highly engaged EAs present to set good norms and get the advantages of information dissemination. Maybe like a fourth to fifth
We will need programming options for different stages participants are at (e.g. not everyone will need full-on group strategy)
Unfortunately it probably can’t be an international thing, since it might be hard to make people at an early stage travel internationally
If this is successful, that would increase the chance that CEA would take over running bootcamps in the future
I am very interested in any thoughts or potential collaborators! Luise.antonia@hotmail.de if someone wants to contact me.
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.
Thanks for asking! The pitch goes something like this:
Uni groups are constrained by their organisers’ time. The typical way of getting a new organiser is to find an excited EA and to slowly give them more and more responsibilities (e.g. intro fellowship facilitator → run a social → committee member). This takes time and there’s dropout at every stage. The observation is that organisers are usually the most motivated after a retreat/conference/… So we might be able to significantly speed up this process and reduce dropout by having a retreat-ish thing early on. Several group organisers have already recognised this and have sent newer members to these things. There seems to be high value in running something specifically aimed at people in the early stages of organising.
So I propose to run a “bootcamp”, where newer organisers, facilitators & similar are skilled up and gain lots of motivation from interacting with others in-person. This seems doubly useful since other organisers seldom have time to skill up new organisers and few new organisers would read into CB resources on their own (especially if they are not yet highly excited about CB).
I’m imagining something like 30 −40 people, 3 nights, with learning and upskilling sessions and ample opportunities to socialise with other participants.
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
Some more thoughts:
We will still need a good amount of highly engaged EAs present to set good norms and get the advantages of information dissemination. Maybe like a fourth to fifth
We will need programming options for different stages participants are at (e.g. not everyone will need full-on group strategy)
Unfortunately it probably can’t be an international thing, since it might be hard to make people at an early stage travel internationally
If this is successful, that would increase the chance that CEA would take over running bootcamps in the future
I am very interested in any thoughts or potential collaborators! Luise.antonia@hotmail.de if someone wants to contact me.
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