Yeah, on the problematic. On the other hand, we're not in a position to drop $300-400 at a minimum (to cover a couple of the GoH workshops, say) if we don't know that there's solid interest (defined as people who have actually registered or are certain to), or whether ASL or CART would be more useful or what. (To put it in perspective, our total budget is in the 10Kish range, including the Guest of Honor expenses.)
We're also in the weird place of having the stuff that people might particularly want ASL or CART for being spread out across our weekend, which doesn't help at all. (We've tended to have one keynote, and the last two years, two guests: two years ago, the second guest did a performance, this last year our second guest preferred other formats.) We're also still low enough on things like volunteers for badge checking and keeping an eye on the hospitality suite and so on that we've been wary of adding more volunteer tasks, no matter how much we'd like to do some other things, because we have core stuff we're still trying to fill.
And again, to put in perspective: we don't have a single guest liaison : three separate people are involved in handling specific stuff from our guests but also have a bunch of other duties, and our guests have also tended to be people who do not necessarily pre-plan speeches well (Notes, yes. Excellent workshops, yes. Full blown pre-written speech, only the first time, and we posted it as soon as we had a copy when he was done) and... lots of specific sub-group cultural stuff that can get tricky to negotiate sometimes about assumptions.
(One of the complications with working with people who treat teaching as a religious commitment and vocation, and who believe that the deities may touch them on the shoulder and say 'this thing needs saying tonight' or the energy of a particular space lending itself to one thing and not another is that, well, they go off script. Often in really awesome ways, but learning to run with that presents some accessibility challenges in a bunch of directions.)
This is also a "take care of your own air mask before helping others" sort of problem: we also care a lot about making sure that the communal spaces like the hospitality suite have someone friendly there, partly so that if there's an issue of safety or harassment, someone knows how to get a board member *fast* if we ever need one (i.e. the hospitality person has the board chair's cell, my cell, a couple of other people's, so we can deal with any major issue quickly if it comes up - central point of contact even if you can't find anyone useful anywhere else) and badge checkers - we only have one, at the entry to the function space - also do a lot of friendly meet+greet and "The bathroom's over there" stuff that's pretty necessary on its own. Obviously, some people might volunteer for transcription who might not volunteer for anything else, but...
(Erm. Run-on paragraph. Sorry.)
And we *know* that a bunch of people are going to need directions to the bathroom, and we know that a bunch of people will need or really want a friendly person in the hospitality suite who can help them out. (And we hope a lot that we won't need to summon people for a crisis, but it's better to plan for the possibility). So the energy goes there first. I'm hoping that in the next year or two we get enough bigger and make that next jump to another layer of volunteers that we can do a lot more. 250's still a bit tricky size-wise.
(500 would still work in our current spaces, or adding space in the hotel that would not cost us a lot more, and obviously give us something like twice the budget to work with, which would make a lot of things more feasible. There's some stuff we can't afford to hire out now because the budget's tight, and in a world where we were less worried about the budget, it'd free up some volunteers or volunteer energy for other thing too.)
I'm doing a workshop at my sorta-local Pagan Pride even next month on Chronic Illness and Pagan Practice, and one of the things I'm planning to talk about there is communicating in advance when you can. (A lot of modern Pagan stuff takes place in private homes, or rented spaces where you're picking and choosing which things matter the most to you.)
The footnote I left out earlier was me pondering about a seeker (someone checking out the group I worked with - series of short public classes that also let you be invited to appropriate new-person friendly rituals in a private home) where we'd asked several times (both in person and in writing) for people to let us know if they had any food limitations (because, private home, we wanted to make sure we had suitable stuff handy or could discuss.) And I still remember someone *not* telling us and then being surprised when it bugged us.
I know asking's really hard for a lot of people, but *not* asking is also really hard on a lot of people (especially when you're talking limited people who can solve a problem.) In that case, we were stuck with "do we start this ritual late, because someone runs to the store, or do we leave this person out of a formal ritual meal?" Neither is a great solution, and because of energy/sleep/etc. needs, starting late is problematic too, on the access front.
I just keep hoping there's a middle ground somewhere that mostly works, and yet keep feeling like I'm not there yet.
no subject
We're also in the weird place of having the stuff that people might particularly want ASL or CART for being spread out across our weekend, which doesn't help at all. (We've tended to have one keynote, and the last two years, two guests: two years ago, the second guest did a performance, this last year our second guest preferred other formats.) We're also still low enough on things like volunteers for badge checking and keeping an eye on the hospitality suite and so on that we've been wary of adding more volunteer tasks, no matter how much we'd like to do some other things, because we have core stuff we're still trying to fill.
And again, to put in perspective: we don't have a single guest liaison : three separate people are involved in handling specific stuff from our guests but also have a bunch of other duties, and our guests have also tended to be people who do not necessarily pre-plan speeches well (Notes, yes. Excellent workshops, yes. Full blown pre-written speech, only the first time, and we posted it as soon as we had a copy when he was done) and... lots of specific sub-group cultural stuff that can get tricky to negotiate sometimes about assumptions.
(One of the complications with working with people who treat teaching as a religious commitment and vocation, and who believe that the deities may touch them on the shoulder and say 'this thing needs saying tonight' or the energy of a particular space lending itself to one thing and not another is that, well, they go off script. Often in really awesome ways, but learning to run with that presents some accessibility challenges in a bunch of directions.)
This is also a "take care of your own air mask before helping others" sort of problem: we also care a lot about making sure that the communal spaces like the hospitality suite have someone friendly there, partly so that if there's an issue of safety or harassment, someone knows how to get a board member *fast* if we ever need one (i.e. the hospitality person has the board chair's cell, my cell, a couple of other people's, so we can deal with any major issue quickly if it comes up - central point of contact even if you can't find anyone useful anywhere else) and badge checkers - we only have one, at the entry to the function space - also do a lot of friendly meet+greet and "The bathroom's over there" stuff that's pretty necessary on its own. Obviously, some people might volunteer for transcription who might not volunteer for anything else, but...
(Erm. Run-on paragraph. Sorry.)
And we *know* that a bunch of people are going to need directions to the bathroom, and we know that a bunch of people will need or really want a friendly person in the hospitality suite who can help them out. (And we hope a lot that we won't need to summon people for a crisis, but it's better to plan for the possibility). So the energy goes there first. I'm hoping that in the next year or two we get enough bigger and make that next jump to another layer of volunteers that we can do a lot more. 250's still a bit tricky size-wise.
(500 would still work in our current spaces, or adding space in the hotel that would not cost us a lot more, and obviously give us something like twice the budget to work with, which would make a lot of things more feasible. There's some stuff we can't afford to hire out now because the budget's tight, and in a world where we were less worried about the budget, it'd free up some volunteers or volunteer energy for other thing too.)
I'm doing a workshop at my sorta-local Pagan Pride even next month on Chronic Illness and Pagan Practice, and one of the things I'm planning to talk about there is communicating in advance when you can. (A lot of modern Pagan stuff takes place in private homes, or rented spaces where you're picking and choosing which things matter the most to you.)
The footnote I left out earlier was me pondering about a seeker (someone checking out the group I worked with - series of short public classes that also let you be invited to appropriate new-person friendly rituals in a private home) where we'd asked several times (both in person and in writing) for people to let us know if they had any food limitations (because, private home, we wanted to make sure we had suitable stuff handy or could discuss.) And I still remember someone *not* telling us and then being surprised when it bugged us.
I know asking's really hard for a lot of people, but *not* asking is also really hard on a lot of people (especially when you're talking limited people who can solve a problem.) In that case, we were stuck with "do we start this ritual late, because someone runs to the store, or do we leave this person out of a formal ritual meal?" Neither is a great solution, and because of energy/sleep/etc. needs, starting late is problematic too, on the access front.
I just keep hoping there's a middle ground somewhere that mostly works, and yet keep feeling like I'm not there yet.