Team Meeting #1

Soon you will be introduced to the members of Music City Spirit individually, but for now, here's a look at the Tennessee 8.  We had our first team meeting this week, so that everyone could get a chance to know each other.

Need a visual for the 1 in 8 statistic?
8 women = 6 spouses, 19 children and 8 grandchildren.

When I first thought about doing an introductory team meeting, I was originally thinking we'd go out for dinner somewhere.  The problem with that was it would be loud, and a long dinner table in the middle of a crowded restaurant really isn't condusive to mixing and mingling.  So I decided to do it at my house.

Then I went to my hubby, who works in food service, and asked him about menu ideas.  My plan was to do a potluck of some sort.  I'm all about keeping things low key and low stress.  It was his idea to do a salad bar.  So I just sent out an email, with a few of the basics (lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, meat, dressing) and let everyone fill in what they'd like to see on their salad.  This became our first team building excercise.  Eventually we'd have pitch tents, shower in trucks, and walk 60 miles together.  But we were at ground zero -- could we even make dinner?

First of all, I can't tell you how exciting it was that all 8 of us here in Nashville had RSVP'd "yes."  I was thinking if we got 5 of us in one place at one time, we'd be doing good.  100% participation?  That's amazing!

So Wednesday night I kept things real simple as a starting point.  I put 8 chairs around the dining room table, and cleared off the breakfast bar.  I put out dinnerware and salad dressing, and left everything else up to us to put together as a team.  The tricky part about this excercise was that if one person wound up not being able to make it... our dinner could be in jeopardy!  Especially if that person was bringing lettuce! 

As people started arriving, I started putting them to work... washing veggies, chopping, opening jars.  The kitchen is always the heart of a home, and having everyone gathered around the breakfast bar working together was a great mixer.  As our salad bar came together we had the basics covered, (lettuce, tomato, cheese) some bonus items  (eggs, cucumbers) and some really creative extras (2 kinds of olives!)  We had bread and dessert and enough food to feed a whole bunch more team members.  Everyone was able to create a salad to their liking, and the best part was -- it was DELICIOUS!

Now I'm thinking back over all the church potlucks and things I've been to in my life and wondering why we never did one salad bar style.

As we sat around the table and talked, we covered topics ranging from kids to favorite places to walk.  Since I'm the only person on the team who's done the 3-Day before I answered a lot of questions.  I love that everyone contributed to the discussion of training walks and fundraising, and that as different as we all are, everyone got along so well.

Of course, one of the most important things we did was discuss ways to tackle our biggest challenge:  How we, as a team, are going to raise $23,000. 

Woah.  10 members times the fundraising minimum of $2300 equals $23 grand.  That's a pretty amazing amount of money.  So how are we going to do it?

That's a topic for another blog post.