Hi! I’m Leilani. I am the director of Canopy Retreats. I also co-run EA at UCLA. You can most often find me in LA or Berkeley.
Leilani Bellamy
Karma: 175
Hi, I’m Leilani. I run the org that was brought on to help with Future Forum in the final weeks leading to the event.
I wanted to verify that no grants were applied for retroactively by Future Forum or Canopy. All funding was approved prior to the event. All OP funding was also received prior to the event. At no point have we been in debt.Additionally, we are eternally grateful for the CEA events team and our volunteers for all their help. It was a stressful and unexpected situation that we would not have gotten through without them.
Hi Will, thank you for your question. I’ll leave my answer here and also put it on the website for future clarification.
By retreat, I mean a gathering of people with a common interest or goal, all sharing space over the course of a weekend or a week. This could be as small as 5 or as large as 50, although I believe between 15 and 30 is the sweet spot. Any more than 30 and it feels like a party, plus you most likely don’t get to know everyone there.
Types of events I’m most excited about: a non-exhaustive listCause-area specific retreats
goal orient retreats ( as in, we’re all going to get together and work really hard for x amount of says to make headway on this problem)
deep learning weeks (where people get together and read a whole textbook, or learn something hard together that they would have put off otherwise)
community-building retreats with a clear goal in mind
Coworking retreats
bonding retreats for orgs
workshop-type retreats for new EAs
HEA retreats targeted at getting people more involved and connected
Things that people call retreats that I’m less excited about:
Large summer camps (we just don’t have the capacity for this right now)
retreats with more than 50 people- might as well make it a mini-conference or split it into two retreats
Retreats that don’t have a clear path to impact.
I’m mostly pointing at things that make retreats worse than actually retreats I’m less excited about. However, I think as we produce more retreats I’ll be able to give a more firm answer to this question.
For anyone else reading this, If the type of retreat you’re excited about isn’t on this list, please still apply for a consultation. I’d be happy to chat.
mid-sized refers to retreats with around 30 people. but we cater to retreats between 5 and 50.
Thank you for this lovely post Severin!