CHHSM Brings Leadership Growth and Development Retreat to UCC’s Southern New England Conference

Answering a call from the Southern New England Conference of the UCC (SNEUCC), CHHSM brought a leadership retreat to the full SNEUCC conference staff in early April. The one-day event included both leadership development and time for personal growth and reflection for staff members who’ve hit the ground running in their conference roles.

SNEUCC is the conference formed from the old UCC Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island Conferences. Approved by UCC General Synod delegates in summer 2019, the conference officially began Jan. 1, 2020 — and then the world shut down due to the COVID pandemic, and staff members coming on board could only meet virtually. 

“We have about 50 staff across our region that mostly work as deployed staff,” said the Rev. Darrell Goodwin, SNEUCC executive conference minister and CHHSM board member. “It’s a premium to gather everyone together in place in person. We also have a great diversity of staff, from out groundskeepers to our administrative assistant team to our executive ministers. All of these factors meant we needed a staff gathering where everyone could find themselves engaged, welcomed, and could leave taking something away professionally and personally. With those ingredients in mind, [CHHSM staffer] Elyse [Berry] worked her magic and developed a theme and a day for our staff that has continued to have positive rippling and impact.”

The retreat included workshops, peer sharing, and reflective rituals to help participants discover tools to engage with change as a creative process. The April 3 retreat offered time for personal renewal and organizational innovation. It was led by the Rev. Dr. Elyse Berry, associate for advocacy and leadership development, and the Rev. Dr. Zaria Davis, associate for membership and engagement.

“In my briefing for the retreat, I learned that SNEUCC has had one retreat in the past to help the staff get to know each other better in this new configuration of the conference,” said Berry. “The vision for this retreat was to develop skills, perspectives, and tools to use to help them work better together as teams, and as the conference as a whole. Another goal was to talk about organizational cycles, change theories, and restorative practices for organizations.”

The morning sessions of the retreat dealt with such organizational change theories as the two-loop theory, tools like pod mapping, and was interspersed with activities and reflection time. The afternoon sessions discussed emergent strategy, including resilience and restorative justice. For many attendees, the CHHSM-led retreat was their first-ever leadership retreat.

“It is important to me to make sure we all develop and are nurtured together. This means that some staff had never been to a professional development opportunity in almost 30 years of their career,” said Goodwin. “One of those staff members personally shared with me that the day with the CHHSM team helped her not only understand the stages of change within our organization, but helped her better understand the impact of these changes in her own department, and her personal resistance. Receiving tangible models gave her language to describe her own feelings toward change [and] provided tools for how she could move forward.”

The SNEUCC staff members were a positive for Davis. “The SNEUCC has some amazing people in leadership,” she said. “The participants were actively engaged throughout our time together. The discussion on how restorative practice is essential in leadership spaces opened the door for future collaboration.”

Berry agreed. “This group had such good energy and really jumped into the materials — both the didactic material and the physical things like ribbons, shakers, playdough, and other materials to engage them as whole people throughout the day,” she said. “This group both thought deeply and danced freely. It was a joy to see.”

Goodwin found the day awe-inspiring. “It was as if Elyse and Zaria were a part of  all of the internal conversations we have had about staff development and formation over the past year,” he said. “Staff left feeling empowered, renewed, but also personally invested in as well.

“If someone is on the fence about hiring the CHHSM team for a staff development/training, it’s a no brainer. We will be inviting CHHSM back next year for sure.”