ECHO-Chicago’s Team Retreat!
A few weeks ago, our ECHO-Chicago team was finally able to be together in person again (masked, of course!) since March 2020! We kicked off our return to the office with a team retreat where we did some Zumba, ate some delicious empanadas, and caught up on some team building!
An activity we loved centered around our values and incorporated art. A few years back, our team took on the task of formalizing our team’s values and has spent many meetings discussing how they impact our work individually, as a team, and as part of the larger ECHO movement. Our values are:
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- Diversity & equity
- Shared learning
- Collaborative & inclusive
- Invested in the community
- Transformative
- Resourceful
- Continuous improvement
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We thought the team retreat would be a perfect time to create a visual reminder of these values that could hang in our office space to view whenever we’re here. Each person had the chance to draw/write what each of the 7 values mean to them and the finished product is now proudly displayed.
We also did our own version of the Lockdown Essentials Anthropology project (https://lockdownessentials.org/) where we created a slide showcasing what got each of us through the shelter-in-place phases of the pandemic. We kept them anonymous so that the group could guess whose slide was whose. Take a look at what got each of us through lockdown!
It was so wonderful to be back together in person as a team—it felt like the culmination of our collective dedication to maintaining those connections and collaborations during our remote work time and a chance to reimagine how we can work together towards our shared ECHO mission. We’ll be taking what we’ve learned forward with us into our new hybrid work model (mostly remote, with some in-person days) and know it will continue to make our team stronger and even more cohesive as we continue our work, both in COVID times and beyond!
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