Sister Community (Dominican and Nicaragua) Meeting Monday April 20, 2020, 7-8:30 PM

Location: Video Conference. Contact me for the link.

Opening Reflection

Dear Lord, thank you for the opportunity to meet this evening. May we engage with each other with faith and perseverance. May we manage this new situation with wisdom and value. May we speak and serve with integrity and purpose.

Lord, we invite you to work within us today. Amen

Introductions

Let’s go around and introduce ourselves.

New Normal

It looks like we won’t travel in July 2020 due to the global pandemic. We always think Campamento will always happen “Si Dios quiere.” Of course God wants us to do camp, so of course it’ll happen again. I’m confident that we can do something, but it won’t be the same as last year. I’m inspired by friends’, my employer’s, and the Church’s response to this virus, they are figuring out a new way – whether it’s:

• a golden birthday parade, complete with a police car, fire trucks, electric scooters, decorate minivans. It really livened up our sleepy neighborhood!
• my employer’s first “road show” to major cities in the US plus London is moving to an online series of events on EventMobi
• Archbishop Hebda offering an inspiring Easter morning Mass and drive-thru blessings.

What’s cool about these is they are all redesigned events under new design constraints. Our design constraints for camp this year are: no travel, no shipping, unreliable/low bandwidth internet.

Campamento has been such a special experience for me and so many others as well as for the girls and Sisters. My hope is that we can find a way to maintain a relationship even though we can’t travel. We might even be able to include some Americans who couldn’t travel but wanted to be a part of it. As a group, let’s review our principles.

Principles of Sister Community Relationships

Let’s review https://campamento.blog/about/principles-of-sister-community-partnerships/

1. Emphasize relationship over resources

2. Practice mutuality and equality

3. Seek to give and receive, learn and teach

4. Work to change unjust systems and structures

5. Deepen our faith by experiencing the universal, catholic church

Brain Writing!

In this exercise, each of us will simply start an e-mail with a few rough ideas for solving the problem in an e-mail. Each e-mail is then sent to someone else, who reads it and adds their own ideas and forwards it to the next. This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each original e-mail. The e-mails can then be gathered, ready for discussion.

The big advantage of brain-writing is that it makes sure everybody is given the opportunity to have their thoughts and ideas thoroughly considered by the group. This avoids the loudest or most extroverted people (I’m guilty!) unintentionally dominating the sessions.

Two rounds:

1. What are the goals of these activities. See https://campamento.blog/about/campamento-goals/ for our on-premises campamento. I’m hoping we can settle on 3-5 goals.
2. Ideas for solutions “Meeting our goals with travel restrictions”

Next, let’s look at each and consider the ideas. I don’t think we’ll come up with a final answer yet, we might even prototype/test some ideas, depending on what we come up with. We can whittle down based on realities of their internet, travel, and shipping. Then, what people will sign up for.

Next Steps
Action items/owners
Next meeting

Closing Prayer

            St. Teresa of Avila