Assembly Trials and Triumphs

by Rachel

It’s been exactly one week since our assembly and I’m still in awe that we actually pulled it off, and pulled it off well! Leaving for spring break we only had about 13 RSVPs and, as my airplane took off, I wondered if it was such a good idea that I was leaving.

The day of the assembly was absolutely chaotic. We had to wake up far too early for someone who had been sleeping in every day until 11 for the past week. Samantha, Kristen and I met early at the house to do a couple of last minute things and make sure that everything was in order. Once we were at Minnetrista it was just go, go, go! Registration was supposed to go from 12:30-1:00, but people started showing up at noon and came until after 1:00pm. One of our panelists was late, but I was too stressed about making sure people were being checked in properly that I couldn’t even worry about that. Once we finally closed shopped at the registration tables we had 37 participants in total. I couldn’t believe it; we were actually pulling this off and it was going well! Actually, it was going even better than I expected!

Unfortunately, I had to spend most of my time manning the doors and running here and there to make sure everything and everyone was where they were supposed to be. The little that I heard of the panelists speak and the questions asked were pretty good. I think the most interesting part, by far, was during the break out sessions for the small groups. We had placed tables in the lobby for the panelists, and they ended up getting into a debate about healthcare themselves! Luckily, Jordan happened to be walking by and heard what was going on so he grabbed a camera and filmed away. I’m so glad we got that on film and I think it will be such a great touch to our documentary!

I am so proud of everyone in our class for doing such an amazing job. I think Kristen, Samantha, and I really learned a lot about what it takes to plan such an event, and the rest of our class did an awesome job helping us pull off everything, especially the small group discussions, which weren’t always the easiest to get through. The fact that it took WIPB months and months to plan and hold their deliberative democracy assembly and we did it in just a little over two months makes it even better. It took a lot of long hours, not to mention stress, but we did it and our hard work definitely paid off!