National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers
September, 1999
In the fall of 1999 Rona facilitated a two-day open space event embedded in a five-day annual conference for the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers. The theme for the open space event was "What are the Possibilities for Ministry in the New Millennium?" The extraordinary organizers for the national conference in Louisville – Barbara McDonald and Sue Brodfehr, both of whom work for the Archdiocese of Louisville – created a powerful conference overall, and worked diligently with Rona in advance of the conference to invent solutions to the problems presented by mixing conference modes – generally considered a bad idea in open space. The result was an integrating, liberating conference event, as demonstrated by these participant observations:
What this has done has bring out the people who come and usually don't have much to say. They put their ideas up there and all of a sudden we're hearing from them instead of just the leaders who always do the talking.
The thing I thought when I saw it was 'This is democracy in action.'
I tailor-made my own conference.
We had some of the best sessions this morning. There were ideas in there that books need to be written about. There are ideas that we didn't know about that haven't come forward and been pulled together before.
Be sure to visit descriptions of other clients for whom we've conducted open space events.
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