How Will Vaccines Impact Retreat Centers?

Written By Guest User

Today’s Community Call brought together 27 retreat center leaders from 16 retreat centers to discuss vaccines. We looked at our current capacity and booking, discussed prudent assumptions looking forward, and then shared our specific concerns, questions, and needs as centers in a variety of contexts and situations putting together reopening plans.

Click the video above to get the full conversation.

As availability of vaccines becomes more widespread, reopening plans need to include ethical, moral, and practical considerations, protect the health and safety of several communities (including vaccinated, non-vaccinated, and anti-vaccination communities), while also respecting and understanding the differences of experience and identity that impact those communities.

Takeaway resources:

  • Please visit our Vaccines and Reopening collaborative document, which captures today’s interactive conversation — you can add information from your center, but please be careful not to delete information.

  • Find and share more resources in our Community Response to COVID-19 Google Folder. This is a great space to share policies, procedures, etc., by uploading your relevant files for others to explore in our shared folder.

  • Our Mighty Network is an interactive social platform designed for retreat center leaders to raise questions, chat with regional groups, and share links and files in conversation threads. Check out the Topics section on Community Calls, or connect with centers in your region in the Collaboration Hubs section.

Our prudent assumptions:

  • Vaccines are now available, and a couple more are coming

  • Each state is progressing at a different speed and has different roll out plans

  • We won’t be quarantining guests

  • We won’t return to pre-COVID style of retreat

  • Vaccination won’t be uniform across staff, guests, teachers

  • Retreat centers will have to adopt specific practices re: moral, ethical, legal, practical responses

  • We may be assuming the vaccine is more effective than it is - carriers? length?

  • Shifting to single rooms in 2021 and 2022

  • Guest needs/attitudes/behaviors are changing or have already changed

  • There will be some residual fear about guest safety

  • The value of our work/mission is worth some risk

Facilitator:

Oren Slozberg, ED at Commonweal

More notes, visuals, and an audio recording of this session are available at the link below.

Guest User
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