Conference Coma

Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I traded in my blue-painted, windowless office at Starfish for a number of windowless hotel conference rooms during the 2008 Governor's Conference on Service and Volunteerism.

After two days of sitting in workshops, I'm still sort of in conference coma. I think hotels must pump something into the air or use special light bulbs or some other nefarious means (like in the pitchers of water always on the tables) by which to keep people at a conference placated and docilely moving from one workshop to the next without a major revolt. Maybe like general anaesthesia it has some lingering effects...

Anyway, today I'm back in the blue office, trying to get projects done and figure out what it was exactly that I learned at this conference.

The high point of the conference was one session on program development. I'm not a program development person, per se, but in the grant writing, I write program descriptions all the time. I also write goals, outcomes and objectives and now, finally, thanks to this workshop, I understand the difference between the three.

I put my new-learned definitions on the dry erase board in the blue office this morning, just to help myself remember them and to have them easily visible when I'm writing grants.

Aside from that, I went to 7 other workshops, many of which were outright duds and some of which were only somewhat helpful. I think other people in my office had much better success in the workshops they picked, so I guess the conference wasn't too bad as a whole.

Also, there were tons of VISTAs there, including folks I hadn't seen since PSO in Chicago in November. It was very fun to catch-up with them and hear how their projects were going.

Now, it's nose to the grindstone to get a newsletter and a postcard out pronto.