Packing Up

I'm Micheal's ride to the youth house. I swing by and pick him up, and on the way we discuss dimensions of leadership. I finagled him into giving the leadership talk a week ago. While I am coordinating this retreat, and I call my self "in charge," I've tried to get other people as involved in the process as possible.

Partly, it's because I can only stand so much of my own voice. I love speaking, and at heart I'm a pedagogue. But with seven talks and easily three times that number of activities and discussions, I want more voices. More people talking means more angles, facets, and interpretations. They call it polyvocality in the biz.



Michael has some good ideas. Not only does his mother teach business folks about the subject, but he is also a young and promising leader himself. I'm pleased.

We get to the youth house. Grab disaster blankets from the basement. Food bags from the outreach room. One of the purposes of this retreat is to give Stand Up For Kids volunteers a small sense of what their services mean to the youth. So we have one foodbag with one meal in it that identical to the kind we hand out on outreach. We have government-issue disaster blankets. The ones the kids hate. Our retreat goers show up slowly. Two volunteer to be carriers of the pepper spray. By 6:00 p.m. we are all there, I have emergency contact info, and we pack up and head out.