[Organizers] Re: 🌟Puttin' On The Dance 3 registration now open!🌟

My wife, Jennifer Horrocks, and I hosted three weekend organizers retreats for the southeast region in 2017, 2018, and 2023. I failed to track down any prior organizer retreats to learn from them. That failure is on me. Jennifer sells contra dance dresses that she sews at weekend dances, which she goes to once or twice a month. It was at these weekend dances, in discussions with their organizers, that the idea of a dance organizers weekend retreat took shape. We've had organizers from Memphis, Baltimore, Charleston, Greenville, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Berea, and others attend (list off the top of my head). I'm bringing this up to note some of our decisions that we made in how we structured these retreats in case there's any value in that structure to others: * We would learn from one another. * There would be no value judgements made. We've made choices in how we've organized our dances. We talked about those choices and what we thought worked and what didn't work. We shared that information. * Effective human communication (shared, open communication) in a group starts to top out with 12 people (from social psychology studies I had read). We had 12 bedrooms in our facility so we limited the weekend retreat to 12 organizations but allowed an organization to have a primary and a secondary representative. We'd end up with 15 to 18 participants. * The only cost to the participants would be their travel costs. We provided housing and food. * The facility (housing, dining, meeting) was a remodeled 150 year old farm house on 100 acres an hour outside of Atlanta. * Informal social time was as valuable as structured meeting time (this we quickly learned). Over the weekend the two balanced out. * The content of the sessions was set by the participants during each meal, with Friday dinner a general meet and greet and lay of the land time. For instance, over Saturday morning's breakfast we decided how many structured sessions we'd have the rest of the morning and the topics that would be covered. At the lunch after those meetings we'd decide what was important to us for the afternoon sessions, etc. What we wanted to talk about would change through the weekend. * Sessions were facilitated in that one person was tasked with putting any tangents on a parking lot board and ensuring that the discussion didn't get hijacked by anyone. Also, any value judgements that crept in were politely clipped. * Sunday sessions were a mix of "what's important that we haven't covered" and left over parking lot tangents that we wanted to discuss. * Topics ranged from "how to keep dust down on the floor" to "what fans make the least noise" to "how do you advertise" to "what sort of contracts to you have with your talent" to "how do you handle the terminology shifts" to "what forms of payment do you accept" to "does a sliding scale work", etc. (etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.) * I covered the housing and food costs. The facility is owned by my family and was available, so I only had utility and cleaning costs to cover for its use. Jennifer cooked the meals for everyone. Jennifer has been asked by organizers to host another one of these, and she's looking into whether the farmhouse is available this summer. The above grew out of a more local afternoon salmon, steak, & veggie grilling for local dance organizers that we hosted for a couple of years before the 2017 regional weekend retreat. Hope this is useful to someone, Heitzso On 3/1/25 08:28, Emily Addison via Organizers wrote: