I had a great meeting with Shafraaz today and I think we have a immdiate plan worked out for Swerve Living. However, I have a ton of work to do over the next two weeks, and this is no joke. Added to everything else already on the go, it means that I need to be very good at enabling the team.
Tomorrow I need to put together a work plan for the next few months. Starting with the media launch of the sales centre for Swerve. Presales will begin the week of May 16 or so. There seems to be much interest and the price in today's market doesn't seem to be scaring anyone so I just we will just go ahead and see how strong the presales are. Indications are that they will go well.
I am glad the meeting went well, it has been seriously stressing me out.
Shafraaz
also mentioned that he and I have been asked to speak at the solar
conference in Edmonton this fall. He has had no word from the Green
Build conference regarding our proposal to speak there. He did hear
that it has been moved to Chicago, so that probably accounts for the
delay.
Then I went to meet with Donna Cardinal at noon today. She was the facilitator at the envisioning workshop about the museum, that Terry and I attended about a month ago. Today's meeting was very inspiring and slowly the pieces are starting to place themselves with regard to my career. The picture is becoming more clear. Donna was a big help and gave me great advice. The meeting went like this:
I walk in and find Donna waiting, we go to the counter and I tell her where I have come from — seeing our architects. She asked me about the project while we are standing in line. The owner of the restaurant overhears the conversation and tell me he is looking for condo projects to buy into early in the project. Tells me he just bought 10 not far away from the shop. I tell him about our intended launch date. He immediately gets excited, thinks the price is reasonable, and gets me his card. That is cool enough, and the meeting with Donna hasn't started.
Donna and I talk about connections, envisioning, the museum, the mayor's task force, and a bunch of other stuff from voice to methodologies around community engagement. We have a more lengthy conversation about connections and voice, enabling collaboration and change. The end of which she says, "It sounds like you have a PhD in the making."
I didn't tell her about a PhD, nor any conversation that my friend Aln and I have had about it. I look at her in amazement and think to myself how odd it is these two things would happen. I talk to her about Action Research and she suggests a couple of possibilities. The most obvious is the University of Portland, but she said that the universities here are fairly progressive and there may be a possibility of doing it locally if the idea is well presented. So I have some steps to take along this path. Very interesting.
She tells me that there is a gift from each envisioning session that she does. That the day with the museum group I was the gift to her. I certainly learned a lot from her that day and even more today as we talked. She has been a gift to me. Donna invited me to join a group of envisioners that meet monthly. It seems like the right thing to do, the connections are being held out for me, so I will go.
As we prepare to leave she encounters a client from whom she will be facilitating a session on environmental curriculum. I have know doubt that I will cross path with her client in the near future.
So tomorrow is the big joint Mayor's Task Force meeting. I am fairly prepared. I got great comments from Mark, Aln, and Janice, all of which helped me to formulate the presentation in the right way. I'll get up early tomorrow morning and finish working out some of the notes on the slides. I feel confident and ready to present. I hope that it goes well.
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