By Mariana Felippe
At Elos, we love bringing people together and we celebrate each time we are able to accomplish this. Some time ago, we created a strategy to hold banquets, where people from our team and other friends offer their culinary skills and we enjoy a special lunch together. Despite the banquets, our desire for more community spaces remains the subject of many conversations and it was during one of these conversations that we came up with the idea of holding a meeting with the Warriors 2012.
Organizing the event was not easy because most of the guests live far away and are quite busy. After the challenge of setting a date (October 20) and establishing the criteria that more than 10 guests should be able to attend, it came time to think about the program and the refreshments (we couldn’t leave this out since people at Elos love cooking and eating!). The question Val, Paulinho and I, who were in charge for the meeting’s preparation, challenged ourselves to answer was: how do we create a very special gathering to make people leave with the feeling of “I’m so glad I came!”?
We came up with a few surprises. We used some pictures from 2012 edition of Warriors Without Weapons for the check-in, which we transformed into postcards. In addition to the postcards, we shared a presentation of the WWW 2012 report firsthand with our guests, before the launching it publicly 10 days later. The day did not end here! After remembering much of what was experienced, it was time to plan together how to make new dreams to happen using open space.
The topics of discussion were:
– The Oasis Mundi platform;
– A gathering of warriors of all time, and
– A SPECTACULAR and inspirational data base for Oasis.
The conversations were great and many people left with homework, such as to engage even more people to make these stories happen. This was only the first meeting of many that we want to accomplish – our plan is organize one per season. Until then, if you want to know more about any of the subjects we discussed, write to me (marianafelippe@institutoelos.com.br) and I will put you in contact with people in the group. Let’s make it happen together!