Today I went to Peterborough with Bob Jung to attend the second strategic planning session for Whitewater Ontario. I was pretty amazed at the turnout. We had people from Hamilton to Ottawa and in between. There had to be about 25 people. Most of the people were there by 09:30.
It was really nice to see some friendly faces of people I had not paddled with since the fall. I had paddled with or at least new everyone in the room except for one person. I finally had the chance to meet John Mason in person.
We got straight to work after some short introductions and some review from the last planning session. We spent the morning working on the vision statement.
After lunch we split off into groups to work out ideas for membership, programs, and communications. I was in the communications group. We kicked around ideas on how to get the word out to the general paddling community. It was decided that we would start by posting press releases on the WO website every couple of weeks and posting up messages on other boards to let people know they were available. Jeff and Gary had mentioned that the current WO website was being overhauled and would be up and running shortly.
We all re-grouped and talked about the different ideas the three groups came up with. There is still alot of work to be done by the groups. We will be spending time over the next few months working within our subgroups via emails, etc working on our objectives.
We finished the meeting at 4pm and headed our separate ways.
Bob and I stopped at his daughters place in Lindsay for a visit which included a lovely roast beef dinner with all the fixings.
I finally got home just after midnight. It was a very long day and time for bed.
