CFS Skills

This past weekend I was able to attend the CFS Skills workshops put on every year to enable directors on various college and university boards to become better suited to do their jobs. Overall it was a good experience in which I learned some valuable things and was able to meet with some very interesting people from all over BC. I will do an overview of the weekend with my thoughts on each of the events.

Day 1

The day started surprisingly late being that is was a Saturday. It seemed to me that the day should have started early on Saturday and then cut out the Monday so that the conference would only go over two days.

It started out with an hour long ice breaker session, which I felt was largely a waste of time with such a large group. This could have been cut out all together.

The only actual workshop of the day was about the rights and responsibilities of boards and directors. It was fairly dull, but there was some essential and basic information. Not everything useful can be fun and exciting I guess.

The day ended with a karaoke night at Felicita's. I found this to be the more fun of the two nights by far, and would advocate that this be the only night Felicita's is opened for this event in the future.

Day 2

This day felt very long. Most people were very tired from the night before and from getting up early to watch the soccer game, and it was a grind for everyone to get through it. It wasn't helped by the quality of the workshops. They were mostly quite mediocre. I'll go through them all one-by-one:

Who's Who: This one was both boring and not incredibly important in my mind. I could have definitely done without.

Public Speaking: This workshop was ok. There were a few good points. I can definitely see how someone who didn't have experience with public speaking could have taken a lot out of this workshop.

Contracts: Again, this was ok. There was some interesting info and it was probably as interesting as could be being that the topic was contracts.

Finances: This workshop could have been much better. It was essentially a platform to show all the crazy things that have been done in the past, but it didn't connect that to good practices that we should be doing. If that connection were to be made in the future, this would be a worthwhile workshop.

Lobbying: This was my favorite workshop of the day. There was some useful information about who and how to lobby.

Campaigns: Unfortunately i was so tired by this point that I don't think I can comment on this workshop one way or another. I was unable to retain any of the information, so it may or may not have been very good.

The day ended with a "dance party" at Felicita's in which I'm sure Felictia's did not do very well, I was so tired I went home early.

Day 3

This day was pretty much the opposite of the previous day. I liked most of the workshops on this day and i felt I was able to gain the more useful info on this day than the other two days combined.

Volunteers: This was a very good workshop that talked about how to recruit and retain volunteers. Definitely useful for anyone in any non-profit organization

Staff: I found this to be pretty generic stuff that I already knew, but there were lots of questions so it seemed that there were people who did get some benefit from this workshop.

Media: This may have been my favorite workshop of the weekend. We learned about developing a media and communications strategy and how to interact with members of the media. From front to back, I found this workshop to be engaging and informative.

Membership engagement: Also a very good workshop. There was some great information on how to engage students in the student society that we can act upon immediately.

Meetings: This was split into two groups, facilitation and participation. I attended the facilitation meeting and got some useful information about how to run smooth meetings. About as interesting as a workshop about Robert's Rules can be.

So that was the Skills weekend from my point of view. If there is anything anyone wants to know about the weekend, feel free to ask.

Rob McDonald

CFS Canada is a group comprised of member locals from Colleges and Universities across Canada. Their purpose is to advocate for student interests and to provide services to member locals such as the skills workshops and the ISIC cards.