Oregon Direct Action

The retreat last weekend went far better than I had expected.  I’d like to first thank Shane and Adrien for helping make it happen, especially because I thought it was a partially absurd idea to begin with.  It’s not often student organizations formally converge to talk about for a length of time beyond a normal meeting.  Within an hour of starting, and more importantly now that I look back upon it, this retreat was a super important step in our development.  I’m sad Hannah couldn’t make it, but we’ll hopefully have another one in the fall.

One of the most valuable components for me was Shane’s presentation on different theories of development.  I, probably unsurprisingly, have no formal education in this area.  His repurposed presentation from Professor Galvan taught me the basics on the different schools of thought.  I feel that I now have a better understanding of the neo-liberalist and post-modernist ways of looking at development, which will ultimately lend us more knowledge in how we define ODA.

Of the things we could improve next time, I think it would be super neat to record our conversations.  While also in alignment of the attempt to become an open source organization, creating MP3’s of our discussions would be a simple way of keeping Hannah, and any future team members, in the loop with what we talked about.  I’m not certain we’ll be able to do this in the fall, as hardware is the limiting factor at the moment, but it’s going to continue to be in my mind.  Additionally, I feel our conversation at the end became rushed, largely because I had to get to work as close to noon as possible.  This is largely my fault, I seemed to have crammed too much to cover in too short of time, but I think a solution for the next retreat would be to run the entire agenda past another pair of eyes.