So, here at CBRP, we don’t have fridays. Well, we do have fridays, I mean, we haven’t lost an entire day of the week to the void. But we don’t have traditional “last day of the work week, everybody is grateful” fridays. For that we have thursdays. I like to call them “thursday-fridays”. But friday-fridays are a whole different ball game. That’s when we have our seminars.
The seminars are intended to introduce us to a broad range of topics linked to community building and partner-based research. They provide a more traditional forum to digest many of the lessons we are absorbing in our work place. And, although sometimes it is difficult to concentrate when the sweet smell of the weekend is hovering just a few hours away from your reaching grasp…..even then… the seminars have been pretty insightful and interesting.
One of my favorite seminars was one of the very first we had. A community leader came in to show us a new method of a needs-assesment that his organization was implememnting to see where their community would prefer health research to be directed. This needs-assesment came in the form of a mobile game… on an iPad, you were given a set number of points (dollars) with which you could purchase brakets of research. You then had to decide what health issues to prioritize….choosing between categories such as “environmental health” or “preventative care”.
That was all well and good, but the really cool part was what happend when the entire group of us were instructed to make the same exact decisions on health care spending as before… but as a body. It’s tough enough making hard and fast decisions on your own… when thown into a decision making process with a whole bunch of very different people….well, let’s just say you learn a lot. Very quickly.
P.S. crazy to think we’ve only got one week left.
