This was an online version of Pamela Welsh’s very successful workship at the Annual Meetings this year, which I wish I’d been able to attend – an article about this from the Inquirer is shown below. (I was busy swimming with dolphins in Egypt at the time, and I like to mention this often.) I was especially happy that Newcastle upon Tyne Unitarians’ new Unitarians in the Community Project Lead, Stevie, was able to join us, as the two of us and Newcastle’s other trustees have been exploring different options for publicising our events.

Pamela and I have discused Unitarian Communications before, due to some of my earlier work with the now-defunct (or at least, in abeyance…) UniComms Unitarian Communicators’ Network, and I was looking forward to hearing from her again. She began by giving us her biography, then pointing out how she had told this as a story to hook our attention – a neat trick.

We then broke out into small groups, and ask ourselves one of Pamela’s ‘top three’ questions from her big workshop at the Annual Meetings: “What keeps you awake at night?” I’ll be honest, this didn’t quite work for me as a comms question. What keeps me up at night is the challenge of recruiting new trustees and the fear that if we fail to do so we’ll be forced to close.

This to me is more of a second-order question, behind the answer to one of Pamela’s other questions: “Ask what makes you come alive!”, which is more inspiring and has answers like ‘helping people explore their spirituality’, ‘Summer School, and how we can bring some of its spirit into our daily lives’, and ‘figuring out what ‘God’ means to me, and trying to find others who might also be wondering’. I do think it’s a valuable question, and certainly those of us in the break-out group had a deep discussion about this. Overall, a most productive workshop.