Strategic Meeting!

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On Friday, Regent Park Focus staff/volunteers (for the record: Steve, Tyrone, Christian, Angela, Pat, Adonis, Emmanuel, Sam and AJ) met at the Goodwill on Bloor Street to do some figuring out with our supporters and partners.

I suppose there was about 20 of us there. Carol from the Cabbagetown Regent Park Museum was there, Sheila from George Brown, I met a man named Kirby who is going to help us bring the magazine out to the schools and other community sites. Our meeting facilitator, Chris started off each segment in the meeting by telling philisophical stories from different parts of the world. He had a long ponytail and was very friendly. When I walked into the meeting room, we had a conversation about Quark, the program I use to layout the magazine. He answered a few of my questions.

At any rate! The meeting started off with all of us contributing to a time line history of Regent Park Focus, from approximately 1990, to the present. I think a couple of people quipped that we all became better acquainted with each other this way, not realizing how long some people had actually been around. The events were marked as both positive ones, and negative ones. Positives included a lot of our staff's "first movie"s and releases of your PSAs. The Hijab and Bikeman, GTA... all of those had their own place on the time line.

We were each given time to dream a little dream for Regent Park, and put it on paper. We then broke into smaller groups to try to come up with a way to rationalize these little dreams.

There were a bunch of breaks. After we made these dream strategies, we took another break, and I had a fun talk with Sheila from George Brown about jeans and Parkdale.
After the break we got into groups of two and tried to come up with a logical next step and someone to handle it. It was a pretty diplomatic way to get commitment from everyone. Holy.

I would have pictures right now, but that camera isn't around right now. Check back in a little while, I'm sure there's some pretty good ones.

P's
AJ



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