Spring Retreat

When I went to the statewide conference, IRHA, back in March, I bid for hosting a retreat called Spring Retreat. This means that I wanted ISU to host a miniature business meeting for the IRHA group. It would mean that all of the communication coordinators from around the state would come to ISU for their meeting.

I have never hosted personally, but I have helped! In 2008, I volunteered during IRHA's Winter Business meeting, as well as volunteering during ISRAA (the RA conference) conference in 2008. Then in 2008, I helped Shannon and her co-chair Julie host the Semi-Business conference at ISU. In 2009, they hosted the state wide conference, IRHA. Whew, lots of hosting going on! But Shannon, Nicole, and I wanted to try for hosting Spring Retreat and try it out.

A few things about Spring Retreat:

• It's not exactly a "Business meeting," its more of a transition weekend. Many schools don't want to spend money on something like that - which makes this a very small meeting!
• Money is tight at all Illinois schools, so many groups were looking for an inexpensive meeting
• Spring Retreat took place after our terms were over, so it was weird not being an actual part of ARH and hosting something sponsored by ARH!
  

Beyond the struggles of the conference its self, we experienced many issues:

• 3 co-chairs was faaaar too hectic. We all wanted to do it, but there were many times were someone felt left out :(
• We had about 1009238 problems with our invoices. Wrong figures, wrong schools, people dropping out, wrong taxes - ahh! It was so frustrating! Because of that, they were sent out sooooo late.
  
• The hotel we chose... well, they were a bunch of losers! They had no customer service and did not care to see if were satisfied or not. Amy will never be staying there again!
  
• Many other little bumps along the way that hopefully we were able to manage!
  

It was a GREAT learning experience, and I do have to say I am glad I was able to do it. Some time next week I am going to type up stuff to pass on to anyone else who is interested in hosting a conference and send it to ARH people and IRHA people to keep on file. If there were things we knew about hosting ahead of time, we could have avoided some of our troubles! (There's nothing like waking up on the Friday of the conference realizing we never made name tags!)

Putting that aside, we asked for some volunteers to help make sure things flowed smoothly. We were in East Campus as well as the hotel, so we made sure to have people in both places when necessary. But a lot of the time, while the group was doing business, we sat around. Don't get me wrong, I had a blast with our co-chairs and volunteers and advisors! Here are some pictures of us goofing around during our off times. Everything looks so fun here - but in between these down times, I was so so stressed out!

Friday

One of the first things we had to do on Friday was set up the hotel for check-in and entertainment. This is a 100% staged photo, but we DID work hard!

Shannon was in charge of making cute door decs for the conference people to know where their rooms were! They were so creative and pretty!

Setting up entertainment was easy, we had board games and guitar hero for night time activities. Here Shannon and Angel are getting everything plugged in!

After dinner and check-in, business started... and that's when we hung out in an adjacent room until we were needed. Lots of card games and Uno!

Then, after business, we moved back to the hotel for "entertainment." This group of volunteers and I had a blast playing lots of Apples to Apples! Personally, I think we needed to amp up our entertainment options and this is something to consider for next time! But we had fun at least!

Saturday

Saturday was a 7am wake up call to get to the hotel for breakfast and set up the business room for day 2! Sadly for Angel he had a roommate conflict and had to sleep on Shannon and my floor for the night! He had an even earlier wake up call cuz we were co-chairs! At least he looks comfortable?

Here's a picture of the communication coordinators who were present at the retreat. This is the room they did a lot of their business in

Meanwhile, our group played more card games, drew pretty pictures, and even did each other's nails!

It was a blast to hang out with ARH people for essentially the last time, as well as learn how to host something. I wish I had tried this earlier, but it was still a good experience. Our evaluations were decent, but I still feel like we could have done better. Own worse critic, huh? Sunday morning came quickly when Shannon and I had to check people out of the hotel... from 7:30-10am. We were hungry, tired, and in need of a shower, especially when we got back to our room aroudn 3am! We came home and slept until 2pm, we were so tired!

I love that this was my last conference experience! Good times with ARH and definitely many lessons learned!