Planning a
ladies retreat with a theme.
I will use Ruth Revisted – a Pure Reunion as an example of
how to put together a retreat for women.
The event is one I planned in 2010 along with some
friends. The reunion was intended to
bring together women who had worked on a series of purity seminars for young
girls back in the 90's. Which explains
the “pure” emphasis.
Any event has several parts:
The DREAM
The HANDS and FEET
The DATE and LOCATION
The OPERATIONAL COSTS and PARTICPANTS FEES
The PURPOSE and PRIORITY
The PARTICIPANTS and LEADERS
The FINISHED PRODUCT
Once the dream is communicated to others, it begins to come
into an existence, take on a name, fall into place – for a time and place. The people who have the dream come together
and plan. Settling on a date can depend
on many things, then a location can be found.
The purpose has to be defined with a mission, goals, guidelines and
ideal finished product.
The participants who will be leading or attending need to be
informed every step of the way, and the finished product is a very well
planned, enjoyable, memorable event.
One of the first things a campground or retreat facility
will ask you is what dates are you looking at, so they can reserve the weekend
just for you.
In order to plan correctly you need to plan well in advance.
No sense paying for a campground, we found retreat centers
can charge as much as $17.00 per person for a bed, no meals included up to
$40.00 per person with a meal or two thrown in.
Some retreat centers want to provide all the meals and you pay, others
let you use their kitchen with an extra deposit charged for potential damages.
There is always an up front down payment based on the number
of people you will be expecting to attend, and you can usually get them to charge
you the minimum to hold the dates, then increase if more people register than
you expected.
So let's get started.
About 6 months before Ruth Revisited 2010, I talked with
some ladies who I thought would catch the vision and help me make this happen.
We decided that if we sent out a FaceBook invite, to see who
was interested, we could get a better feel for whether this would take off or
not. So we did, we gave the event a
name, Ruth Revisited – a Pure Reunion.
Ruth would mean something to most ladies invited because
when we did the retreats for young ladies back in the 90's we used Biblical
names for the retreats. Esther Seminar,
Ruth Seminar, Mary, etc.
We met for lunch and scheduled some evening meetings. After a few meetings we invited a few teenage
girls to join us. At about the 3rd
meeting we came up with a date, a few campgrounds to research and a basic
schedule for the event.
Since I was doing the majority of the teachings, we didn't
have a keynote speaker with fees, or other workshop leaders to pay, so we kept
our costs down. I invited my sister to
bring her crafts for a display and we included a session of crafts on Saturday
morning which proved to be one of the highlights of the event.
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