Meeting Each Other in Person (and other major achievements): A recap of the CRAG-VT board retreat
When the pandemic started in 2020, the CRAG-VT board moved our monthly meetings to Zoom. Just like the rest of the globe, we started to see each other as little floating heads in boxes on screens, instead of real human beings with eyes you can make eye contact with, and legs.
Every monthly board meeting (except for one in June of 2021 which we had in camp chairs in the Bolton Quarry parking lot) over the last 2 years has been virtual. This feels particularly wild when you consider that we have had two board elections, planned and hosted an entire Vermont Climbing Fest, hired an executive director, and done countless tasks in our work for accessible Vermont climbing. Some of us have been working together for more than a year, but had still never met in person.
So when our leadership proposed that we meet up in-person for a board retreat to, at the very least, put faces to screen names, there was a resolved yes to make it happen. Kris, our president, Lauren, our executive director, and Mischa, our vice president planned and schemed and organized their way into a full day of us being able to spend time together and make some plans for the upcoming work we will be doing on the Board.
We started with a half day of ice climbing at the quarry. This wasn’t so much CRAG business as it was an attempt to get the ice-hesitant like me to put crampons on. (It didn’t work.) It was also a chance to, simply put, hang out. There were several of us who had never ice climbed before and tried it for the first time. Mischa set up top ropes for us and fed us most incredible batches of homemade soup for lunch. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more pleasant Sunday morning.
After ice climbing in the morning, we did actually get to work. We spent the afternoon in the yoga room of MetroRock in Essex, working through the bigger questions that guide our work. With so many new board members, an executive director for the first time ever, and the creation of a committee structure, the CRAG board is in a moment of uncharted waters. This is what made this retreat all the more important. We started by learning about the history of CRAG; seeing where we started and understanding how far we’ve come. We asked big questions like What are our values? and How do we set our priorities? We also focused on details like short and long term goals for each of our committees.
(For reference, the board works in 4 committees: Access, Stewardship, Events, and JDEI.)
At the end of the day, we certainly don’t have everything ironed out, but we left with a sense of motivation and direction. There was one theme that rose to the top of the conversation again, and again; community. At the end of the day, we are a board that is elected to serve our members, and that is what we’re committed to doing. We care about Vermont climbing because we’re Vermont climbers, but also because we’re your neighbors, your climbing partners, and members of the same Front Porch Forums.
We have another retreat on the books for later this year to keep doing this work, and each committee meets regularly to keep moving along on our specific goals. If you’re interested in joining any of our committees give us a shout through our Volunteer Form, and our monthly board meetings are always open to the public, whether virtual or in-person. You can find the links to join us for our meeting on March 8th, as well as get to know our Board Members at cragvt.org.
