Laurel-- I agree with you about the food. It is nice to feel taken-care-of, and to have something available whatever time zone your body clock is living in that day. And to have the pleasure of eating together.
Our current client is wonderful about food. For the seminars with the top management team, a small group, they brought wonderful potluck lunches. For the Open Space, they arranged for coffee, muffins and "snack mix" things to be available from 7:30 am until 4:00. Caterers set up a sumptuous buffet from 11:30-1:30, sliced meats and sandwich rolls, several salads, cookies and brownies, all of it as beautiful as it was tasty. When people picked up their name tags, each was presented with a nice coffee mug with the organization logo in gold, and a gold pen to mark their name on their mug. I felt honored, as well as well-fed. And it seemed that the participants did too. From a practical standpoint, I especially appreciate food available when I'm facilitating, as I have often gotten up much earlier than usual and am ready for snacks or lunch at a truly unreasonable early hour! In other circumstances, where there was not an organization involved, it has worked well to charge a small fee and have box lunches. For my first large-scale meeting, a nonprofit group in the community made tasty brown-bag lunches for a very reasonable price, as a fund-raiser for their work. Maybe it is just my longtime experience of feeding people, but it does seem right to have something good available when people work all day. I liked Dave's suggestion of turning the whole food issue over to someone who might like to contribute in that way--I'd rather facilitate and hold space and let someone else think about food. Joelle * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu, Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
