EA - On retreats: nail the 'vibes' and venue by Vaidehi Agarwalla

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On retreats: nail the 'vibes' and venue, published by Vaidehi Agarwalla on October 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This year I attended a few retreats with different goals and audiences (mostly for people already fairly involved in EA). This post lists some observations and lessons I took away from them about how I would want to run a retreat.I’ve probably written some suggestions with more confidence than is warranted - I have strong opinions that are weakly held. For brevity, I've not always delved into my reasoning for every specific point, but I'm happy to expand in the comments! I’ve shared early versions of this advice with a couple of people running retreats, and it seemed to be helpful.Not all of this advice will apply to any one retreat, I think the best way to read this is to take what makes sense given your goals and use those. I think most of these suggestions are useful for community retreats; and maybe ~30-60% are useful for professional retreats. I'd be really excited for more people to share their reflections on what's worked and what hasn't.Nail the 'vibes'Your goal is (probably) to help people make friends. For this reason, the vibes matter. Take time to observe how the attendees are interacting, and regularly ask the most perceptive or senior attendees how it’s going. It’s important to preserve participants’ intention, energy, and eagerness to participate proactively.Go light with the schedule & be flexible with contentCreating a schedule is always difficult, but when in doubt I advocate for cutting things (ruthlessly). I think that attendees will ultimately care more about the overall flow and atmosphere than that extra session.Have a shorter ‘work’ day of (high quality) scheduled events to leave enough time for chilling and socializing (e.g., 10am-5pm). This will give participants time to make friends and prevent them getting too tired. That being said - make sure the content you do have is excellent.Be willing and able to pivot - don’t be scared to throw out the schedule and do something else if you feel participants aren't resonating with the content you have, or someone makes a suggestion that seems good.Factor in downtime for attendees to recover from travel.Make people feel comfortable and relaxedTry to avoid people coming late: It can feel bad to miss the first day. If people must come late, batch latecomers and have someone give them an orientation and introduce them to other participants. Consider introducing latecomers to someone beforehand, so they know at least one non-organizer when they arrive.Check in with folks: Organizers can identify and periodically check on (e.g.) the 30% of participants who are most likely to feel out of place: for example, newer EAs or people who are less well-connected.Look out for each other: The German funconference had ‘awareness facilitators’ who would support you in case of physical & mental health problems or if you felt like someone crossed your boundaries, and who would keep information confidential. I thought this was a really good thing to have.Help people get to know each other before the retreat: You can share a ‘names and faces’ deck of all the attendees for people to read, and also print them and put them out in the common areas.Consider activities which allow people to seek help and be vulnerable, if it makes sense: I have found Hamming Circles during retreats to be quite helpful and a positive experience (and others who've participated say the same). However, they can be very intense and it's likely that I had a positive experience because I only opted into them when I already trusted the people around me, felt open to the experience, and when the activity was being run by someone who was experienced in running these kinds of activities.Think about ways to facilitate...