Black Design Guild. Feedback

Hi! We’re the Black Design Guild. This blog is about setting up a programme to invest in the future generation of Black researchers and designers working across civil society. If you’re new to this blog series you can catch up on the journey here.

BLOG TWENTY: Retreat Reflections

This week has been a busy one for the team. We’ve spent the week prepping for our first Advisor Session since December, getting prepped for our final prototype with employers, and getting ready to share the feedback we received from the ten amazing people who joined the pilot retreat.

There is a lot to share but so that we don’t overwhelm you, we wanted to focus on those retreat reflections in this blog.

So…(*drumroll*) here are the stats…

Fig 1. A summary of the feedback we got on our post-retreat survey. Template of what we used here

We’re excited that logistics, comms and care were awarded the highest scores. The team spent a lot of time designing these parts of the journey, and we’re really glad that attention to detail paid off. 💃🏾

We heard that the venue and facilitation were both strong. We did get a call for more assertiveness with people who were speaking for too long.

On the content, there was some room for improvement. The main feedback was that people wanted more of it. There was also a call for a longer retreat to leave more time to go deeper, to process and have more time to reflect.

Fig 2. Answers to which parts of the retreat guests felt were most impactful, ranked in order.

Overall the Leadership modules, Self-Reflective Practice and Fireside Chat ranked in the top three most useful elements of the retreat.

People also wanted more downtime and time to connect with peers.

Overall, the lowest scores were for food. People really appreciated the Black-owned snacks, ginger and turmeric shots. Though one person called for a selection of healthier snacks because, and we quote, “There’s only so much Chin Chin you can eat” 😂. On top of this, guests highlighted that while it was healthy, fresh, local, and seasonal, we weren’t able to add anything to make it our own. There is only so much that hot sauce can do.

Plus, and most importantly, multiple guests noted that there was a massive, inexcusable error made which flew in the face of the care, belonging and safety we’d curated. We’ve fed this back to the venue and will pay close attention to this in the future.

Overall, however, the retreat went down better than we could have imagined. Here’s a video of some of the feedback we received.

A video of some feedback (and a couple of pics) from the Black Design Guild Pilot Retreat

The feedback is so rich and the ripples of impact from the retreat are already being lived and felt. Plus, everyone who responded to the question “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the retreat to a friend or colleague?” gave the retreat a 10. That gives the retreat a net promoter score of 100. Whoop. 🎉🎉🎉

We’re really proud (and thankful) of the feedback and energised to focus in on those areas we need to look at in more detail; namely food, the length of the retreat and the amount of meaningful content.

Before then, however, we’ll be busy finishing up our final prototype and turning our energies towards securing funding to continue this work.

We’ll share a little more about that when we’re back in two weeks and we’ll also share some of the assets, tools, guides & content we used at the retreat.

Until then, thanks for reading or listening. We appreciate you.

The Black Design Guild Team. 💜

This work is housed by Hello Brave and funded by Impact on Urban Health.