It’s been a long and exhausting weekend for us at Opportunity Green, as we worked long and hard to throw a fantastic conference for everyone.  A lot of lessons have been learned on my end, watching how the intensely crazy registration panned out for us and getting a behind-the-scenes look at how things were running.  We didn’t expect so many people to show up to the event, so it was challenging to handle the overload in capacity, but it’s great that we got so many interested people to attend.  All in all I had a rewarding experience, getting great feedback from participants who were so thankful and appreciative!

Working the registration table for speakers, sponsors, and press!

I’ve also had some fabulous conversations come out of these past couple of days, as I randomly chatted with other volunteers, a few sponsors, and some of the attendees.  It’s wonderful that people are so friendly and most were very patient with us.  Granted, registration delays were probably expected for those who showed up without being registered online already.  Things also worked so well because we had dedicated interns diligently working from the wee morning hours til late in the evening, volunteering our entire weekend to make this event happen.  Of course, the OG full-timers were working even harder, sleeping less, staying longer, but never complaining about how exhausted they must have been.

Many a time we had to be resourceful, giving, and downright creative to get the work done, but as one of our staff pointed out, we never lost our cool.  It never occurred to me just how useful that must have been in keeping everything running smoothly, but it’s true!  I suppose that’s a large part of why the participants were so enthusiastic about their experience at the conference, because they never saw any of the fires we were putting out throughout the day.  That’s exactly how things should be!  It will get hectic and overwhelming at an event of this scale, but with everyone working the event being level-headed and patient, we got through just fine.

Now it’s time to enjoy the trappings I did manage to get from the conference (like these awesome bamboo USB drives from MINI USA and a lovely Whitelines notebook) and let my body recover.  Everything aches or throbs and my mind is so cloudy I keep on making typo errors, but I’m glad to know that tomorrow I will have no more physically draining activities.  Rather, I’ll be working hard on my sample entries for Change.org, as I apply to be a freelance blogger for them while I look for a job and try to get more involved in the green space.