Recipes for Successful Meetings

In a week’s time the Green and Away trustees plus the coordinator will be gathering for the annual spring meeting to plan the forthcoming season.  The format for the meetings hasn’t changed much in the 20 years or so G&A has been running so it seems to be a successful way to run things.  Many trustee meetings are run very formally with short meetings, minimal discussion, presentation of reports and voting on a few decisions.  As our trustees are also our managers our meeting has to encompass planning, personel matters, finance, administration, health and saftey and long term strategy so it is necessarily longer.

However our recipe for success is to take a whole weekend, have everyone stay for two nights so there is plenty of out of room discussion time, and to have lots of tea and cake – especially cake.  Sharing food is a very old traditional way of showing hospitality.  In bedouin traditions any stranger was safe to stay for three days with his host and to eat with the family, the idea being that at the end of that time you would know the person too well to  make him your enemy.  Most people-problems come from lack of understanding and communication.  If you give plenty of time for both then problems are much less likely to go occur, and not only that, the whole business is more likely to be enjoyable.

Many people groan at the thought of meetings as they think that meetings are boring.   If there is plenty of time for discussion, airing ones views, humour and for reaching consensus then one can create a team that works well together, enjoys each others company and meetings that can be stimulating, creative and enjoyable.

After many years of hosting conferences we know that the format we provide for meetings in our outdoor venue works well for other organisations.  We have seen how successfully organisations get through strategy meetings at G&A because they have 2 or 3 day residential events where there is time not just for business but for social contact, networking and bonding.  In this atmosphere, workers and bosses see each other firstly as ordinary human beings who have needs and something to offer rather than aloof bosses  all of which can eliminate an ‘us and them’ attitude.  The positive atmostphere brings a new committment to the work of the orgnaisation.

So a recipe for successful meetings would look like this:

Take a bunch of people from an organisation

Provide plenty of tea and cake

Provide sufficient time for business and friendship

Provide surroundings that are comfortable, informal and preferably in nature

Provide meals so everyone eats together

Provide overnight accommodation

Meet with respect for each other – everyone has value

The result – an enthusiastic committed workforce with creativity, passion. feelings of belonging and being of value.

Informal meetings at G&A are fun and productive

Spring Preparations

Today I picked up 10 specially selected, early-fruiting, baby apple trees from Days Cottage to plant on our site.  You can see from our photographs above that we are not short of trees, but few of them bear any fruit.     There are 3 amazing mulberry trees which come into fruit during our season but if you have ever tried to pick mulberries you will know why you can’t buy them in the supermarket.  Mulberries taste delicious but they are fragile fruits and burst their purple juice all over the person picking them.  We can always tell who has been visiting the mulberry trees!

As part of our sustainable education and carbon awareness, right from the beginning we have asked car drivers to pay a tree fee to offset the carbon they used to drive to the events.  Green and Away has been doing this for years before the phrase Carbon Offset was invented – we were well ahead of the mainstream. Over the years this has enabled us to plant quite a lot of trees in various sites including our present one.  However we haven’t planted fruit trees before.

Our policy to provide local organic fair-trade food is one that can be difficult to abide by all the time.  People have expectations that you cannot ignore.  Even though our season runs through June and July and into August, people expect to be able to eat the British ‘staples’ of apples and pears.  And yet these fruits generally don’t ripen until early September.  We are used to buying these fruits all the year round but for half the year they are imported from the Southern Hemisphere so the number of food miles is huge. In season fruits include strawberries and raspberries but lovely though these are it becomes prohibitively expensive to provide them for 180 people.  So we compromise and offer organic apples and pears from Argentina as well as bananas from the Caribbean, but we want to move to being more sustainable with fruit and the very early fruiting apple trees are the first step.  We hope that in a few years they will be producing ripe fruit by the end of July and in August. We also plan to plant black currants and gooseberries this spring too.

Other preparations for the forthcoming season are going ahead.  We have had a good number of applications for the internships (closing date 23 March), the Artist in Residence post has just been advertised, we have purchased a new (to us) office caravan and the spring trustees meeting for planning the summer is just weeks away.  The Winter Gathering of volunteers two weeks ago was a great opportunity to meet up and renew friendships and talk about the summer to come.  As the spring progresses more elements of Green and Away get reborn and prepared for the summer season.  We just have a couple more spaces left for conferences to book in to complete our plans.