Near the beginning of February the team lead and interns, myself included, went out of town for a retreat of silence. We stayed for a day and between journaling, being well fed and getting sunburned I had quite an enjoyable experience. I do love city life but all the time spent among apartment buildings, smog, honking cars and trash filled streets makes nature, blue skies and a cool breeze that much more enjoyable. It was also nice to come fresh into the next stage of my team's work in the neighborhood.
Over the corse of last month and the one before we have found a space for the community center and gone through and intense week of visioning. The space we finally settled on has a good sized main room for hosting community meetings and a smaller side room that will hopefully be used for a variety of classes. We have let the people we're renting from know what our plans are for the space and they seem to be on board but prayers for favor with them are definitely welcome. After we made all the arrangements for renting the space we had some people from our company com join us as we talked about the vision of the community center and the specifics of how we're going to get there. We met for five days straight talking about what we hoped to see happen in the community through the center, what that looked like on a practical level and how we would measure the success of our projects when we went back to review. In all honestly I felt like I was back in some entrepreneurship class going through a business plan. All very good stuff but at the same time rather draining. Now that we have our first round of ideas set forth we get to try them out and see how they go.