Best Practices, Learnings, and What’s New for Onsite Retreats

Pandemic-era onsite retreats look and feel a little different for many of us.

Our community call on September 13th was an opportunity to share concerns, identify needs and opportunities, and support one another as we enter the last quarter of 2022.

Scroll through headlines from our conversation, and follow the link to more notes and audio below.

Programming Partnerships

  • Working on a new partnership around spiritual direction - including onsite training and hosting people in a new 3-year program

  • Hoping to participate in an upcoming Community of Communities event (with Diane Wilson, author of The Seed Keeper) - it’s a hybrid program with a centralized main speaker appearing virtually to satellite campuses - because our funds are tight we’re doing pre-registration to guarantee our income

Kitchen Staffing and Compliance

  • Kitchen staff turnover is a vulnerable spot for us - we’re seeing that anyone who is hired into our staff needs to have willingness to learn and accomplish some kitchen tasks - it’s also an important spiritual role - at our center, retreatants also work in the kitchen while on retreat - we’ve begun cross-training some of our positions during the pandemic to limit our vulnerability and balance staff’s roles with different work

  • Meal ministry at our center was an opportunity to meet, interact, and serve - the sense of gathering at table is really important from both Buddhist and Christian perspectives

  • Liability and insurance hasn’t been on the new owners’ screens, but it needs to be. 

  • We have limited staffing resources, not as many full-time positions

  • We’re focusing on increasing training within the Latino community, especially for undocumented, and developing a Spanish-language training for food service licensing - one of our staff will lead that

  • Looking at new questions. Who can we hire? Who can be on payroll without a SSN?

    • This situation is difficult with undocumented staff in kitchen - can't hire directly because of lack of SSN - can't be in compliance with providing insurance due to no SSN. However, undocumented individuals are granted an ITIN number to pay taxes. Individuals might be able to be employed not as staff but as contractors and have them pay their own taxes at the end of each year. This takes liability away from the center…

  • Outside catering has been a big expense for us

  • We’re considering partnering with a caterer who could use our kitchen for multiple purposes, including her own staff and outside business

  • Challenges with a previous caterer partnership:

    • Caterer quoted too low for per-plate-costs

    • Signed contracts regarding insurance for the caterer’s people - but turned out to not be insured - compliance issues can be a big challenge in food service

  • We’ve tried to look at working with compliance officers as “free consultants”

Inflation and Increased Food Costs

  • We’ve served the Buddhist and the kosher communities. Food is important to us

  • Food costs have skyrocketed 25-30%

  • For people who can’t afford the meals we offer onsite, we’re seeing groups manage their own food

  • If costs have increased, we have to pass that along to our guests. Pre-load that conversation with emails during registration. “We’re surviving here and working for you”

Staff Benefits and Perks

  • We’re considering offering some new benefits to staff at our center - retreat vouchers, for themselves or other people - do other centers offer this?

    • We contract with program partners for most of our programs, so we can’t offer space to our employees

    • During the pandemic we offered R&R retreats, where staff stay for free and receive a discount on the meals (chef is contracted separately)

    • As a mostly hosting facility, we encouraged staff to create their own retreats, often at other retreat centers 

      • This can be an educational experience for staff, and they have an opportunity to develop individualized content to meet their needs - e.g. a men’s retreat for African American men

      • Very insightful to explore these - great if you can afford it

    • We encourage our staff of 7 to go on retreat and visit other retreats. As one of 5 other ministries onsite, we offer a “gift of the spirit” financial aid for onsite retreats to all who work on the grounds. We offer 24-30 different kinds of retreats for them to choose from - our center serves a wide variety of groups from grade school to college students, Catholic, Hindu, yoga, quilters, church training, etc. The farm onsite is a big draw for kids

  • Because staff is at the lowest place it’s been in a long time, we can’t afford to offer them retreats at this time. But with a new fundraising plan and new ED, hoping to recoup roles

Innovations

  • We’re working with a new program, the Innovative Learning and Living Institute (ILALI), which is being piloted at Whidbey. It’s an onsite residential program for participants aged 21-29. As site liaison, I’m engaging and connecting our team with this program. This is more partnering than I normally do with programs. Beneficial for us to be steadily booked during our slow months in the winter

  • Does anyone have experience with ElderHostel programs at their centers?

    • Yes, it was hugely successful for some years - they’d bring a group annually, curious and interested participants, it’s a good opportunity in this nearly post-covid world

Programming Revenue and Cancellations

  • Have numbers picked up in programming to pre-pandemic levels? 

    • Yes - 3 of 8

  • Are these virtual, hybrid, or onsite?

  • Hybrid is strong, but we still aren’t back to pre-pandemic levels

  • Have to depend on our hosted groups

  • We don’t have an online component at our center, not back to pre-pandemic level

  • More cancellations than in the past

  • May need to re-work our policies in terms of extremely last-minute cancellations

  • Our booking cycle has shrunk from 12-18 months to 3-6 months with several groups asking for contracts within 30 days. We attribute this to people being wary about variance in the future that could interrupt the ability to execute a retreat.

Transitions in Covid Safety Policies

  • We’re reconsidering our policy of requiring both vaccinations and boosters for onsite employees - sense that it’s time to transition

  • We require testing 3 days prior, and upon arrival, and when symptoms arise

  • We don’t require the boosters from folks who come onsite

  • Dropped our active enforcement of masking around unvaccinated guests - seeing a trend of going more lax with these

  • Our policies are highly influenced by the region - county and state - culture is very lax around us, actually to the point of complacency, which causes problems - the governor has sued churches and schools that have barred access

  • Because our center is under the diocese, we’re required to get vaccinated as employees, but we’re no longer in the same building as the sisters. For people who enter our space, we follow the college’s protocols (no mask requirements)

  • We’ve required participants to be vaccinated, but we don’t check. We do onsite testing upon arrival, but it’s not fool-proof. Groups decide amongst themselves whether they’re masking or unmasking

  • We no longer require masks, social distancing, or vaccinations - we went from June 2020 - June 2022 without cases. We now have had some cases, but they’ve been mild

  • We let our groups choose how they want to manage their group’s safety - there’s a range of responses.

  • Our cases have been individual cases, not super spreaders - we’ve asked groups to report back post-event consistently - my perspective is that it’s going endemic

  • Our staff relationships are deep as residents and cooperative members - but we have a range of approaches within the community. Most people are not masking, but we’re also not packing rooms the way we used to

  • Rules are going by the wayside for the most part, but we’re still paying attention

  • Good to at least ask that leadership of onsite groups notify us if people test positive or have been exposed

  • “Problems you can solve - dilemmas you can only manage”

Learnings from Lindenwood

  • Looking back, we’re seeing how the center is renewing after the winter of the pandemic - seeing what we can be again - being patient with the seasons

  • Having a retreat center with people in it - that still works! That togetherness is important

  • For the hosted groups that have had a long commitment to our center, we checked in on them, ‘how are you doing?’ throughout the pandemic, often rolling a deposit or refunding it, treating them with respect.

  • We’ve had 20 groups return now, finally, after not seeing them during the last 2 years

Learnings from Pearlstone

  • While our group size has been growing in the last 3 months we also noticed pre-pandemic in 2019 our group sizes were between 50 and 120 and they have shrunk considerably now to being closer to between 25 and 50 in the last year. In order to reach our revenue goals we have been executing simultaneous, multiple groups in that smaller range size some with different menus and meeting room sets.

  • I know many of my colleagues share the difficulties in hiring as we grow back our staff and capacity from cuts that were made at the start of the pandemic. Truly a deep question about when you hire aspirationally versus already seeing the revenue come in to justify the increases in payroll. 

  • A note about our retreats: we have a mix of retreat business between immersive retreats that we run ourselves such as Jewish holidays which are always sold out, campus rentals that may or may not have a food or lodging component, Airbnb type rentals of our cabins and homes, and rental immersive retreats that are contracted by group leaders using our facilities much as one might imagine at a conference center.

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