Oh! Chicago. Our Spring Staff Retreat

Last month, thanks to a capacity building grant from Inatai Foundation, our entire staff had the opportunity to travel to Chicago for our Spring Staff retreat. Since we provide year-round, school-based programming, it’s not often we have a chance to rest, reflect, play, and learn together. Why Chicago? Not only does one of our beloved staff have deep roots in Chicago, but we also wanted to learn from several incredible organizations that are doing transformative, systems change work in their communities outside of Seattle. During our trip, we visited two organizations: Alternatives, Inc and Chicago Freedom Schools, both of whom are values aligned and supporting youth and school communities through Restorative Justice programming and youth organizing. As WA-BLOC hopes to continue scaling Restorative Practices and Freedom Schools programming here in our region, it was encouraging to share both challenges, successes, and strategies across organizations. We even got to experience the solar eclipse together :) 

In addition to our awesome site visits and tons of delicious food (debate is still out about the best deep dish pizza!) our team had lots of meaningful time together in circle exploring and grounding ourselves in our values of rest, joy, collaboration and how we want to build (“operationalize”) more intentional space and capacity for these values in our collective work together. We have found that holding strategic planning/retreat conversations in circle is really impactful (not to mention efficient!) Circle not only allows us to hear valuable perspectives from all of our staff on important topics and issues, but also creates shared meaning and accountability to the ways we want to grow as a team. We experienced many aha moments and creative solutions through our time in circle and our entire team felt energized by the end of the retreat.