report from "How can I practice peace?" in Chicago

[Joelle Lyons Everett]

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

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