BELL's Second Annual All-Staff Convening
Earlier this month, BELL’s full-time employees from across the country joined together in Connecticut for our second annual All-Staff Convening.
My role in the Convening was a big one. As the Executive Assistant, and a member of the Convening Committee, I was responsible for most of the behind-the-scenes stuff. Basically, I handled booking everyone’s travel, ordered the food, and many other tiny details that often go unnoticed until something goes wrong (like that moment when our CEO couldn’t check into her hotel room because of a glitch in the system…!!). It was, at times, a stressful project. But now that it’s over, I’m here to tell you why the 2015 All-Staff Convening was so incredibly rewarding for me, my fellow staff and our scholars.
I joined BELL in July 2015, and up until last week, I had not yet met many of my colleagues. Of course, I had spoken to my team over the phone or through email, but last week truly was the first time I was able to put names to faces.
Impressively, in the three days we were together, I got to know the BELL team even beyond just names. We shared best-practices, learned of peoples’ strengths and weaknesses, and thought creatively with others about how to tackle some of BELL’s biggest challenges. We even saw each other on stage, in 70’s disco costumes singing a rendition of “Stayin’ Alive” in which the lyrics were, of course, changed to “Readin’ a Lot”.
In short, when we arrived on Monday, I greeted everyone with a handshake; yet, by Wednesday, I was hugging my team goodbye as if we’d worked together for years. I cannot begin to explain how this connection will positively impact the work I do at BELL every single day, and ultimately, how our team’s strength will trickle down to positively affect our scholars.
The Convening also reinforced to me that BELL employees love the work we do. We are emotionally invested in changing the life trajectories of our scholars; it’s not just a sentence on our website. We cry, we laugh, we teach, we connect. We strive every day to make our programs the best they can be so that we can have the greatest impact on the lives of our scholars.
So although the event itself may be over, the lessons we learned from it are not. I believe that the Convening made BELL stronger and when BELL is stronger, so are our scholars; and that, to me, makes every single ‘stressful’ minute of planning and logistics worth it!
- Jessica Zikaras