Blog

By Ross Wirth, Class of 2019

Greetings from Switzerland!

Having experienced several of our traditional “fake springs,” clearly it must be time for real spring, right?  The river has faded from a vibrant kelly-green back to its traditional clay green, which means River Cruise season has launched. Congrats to all for a successful launch!

I’m sorry I missed the 2024 Tour Season Kick-off party as I’m out of town.  Thank you to Cynthia Bates for underwriting this event.  As the season warms, I’m excited for the tours I have booked for April and May – I can’t wait to show a new set of visitors our city and delight returning CAC members with new stories or a revisit to one of Chicago’s great sights.

I was in Rome at the beginning of the month and stopped in to see one of my favorite sites: The Pantheon – the world’s largest non-reinforced concrete dome.  A stunning achievement in any era, let alone over two thousand years ago!  It takes my breath away each time – and whenever I stand under Chicago’s world’s largest Tiffany dome, I take a quick trip in my mind back to Rome!

Beyond gearing up for tour season 2024, in early March we held our Docent Council Strategy Workshop where Docent Council and Committee Leads, along with Monica Wilczak & Caroline Duda, gathered to develop next year’s strategies.

The workshop started with reflections from the three taskforces created in last year’s session – Docent Experience, Digital Growth, and Docent & Staff Collaboration.  Workshop participants then generated 150+ ideas, and in four distinct teams utilized the Design Thinking to tailor and refine their ideas.

The ultimate outcome was a decision to continue two of last year’s taskforces and create two new taskforces to advance our activities in support of the CAC’s vision.  These include:

• Docent + Staff Collaboration – will continue with a focus on developing integrated partnership between Staff & Docents. Staff membership on this critical taskforce will be expanded so we have 50/50 representation between docents and staff.
• Digital Growth – will continue with a focus on defining digital offerings & partnerong with Staff to develop digital platform for content both internally and externally.
• Developing a Culture of Mentorship – we will launch a new taskforce focused on all things mentorship & stewardship (beyond new Docent training) across the whole of the Docent community.
• CAC Tours Optimized to Stakeholder Needs – we will launch a new taskforce in partnership with staff to review, refine, and optimize the processes around tour creation, selection, and scheduling. This group will address the questions some have been asking on how we execute the CAC walking tour strategy.

Docent Council will be discussing actions and next steps at our coming meetings. I will post a more in-depth read-out of the Strategy Workshop to The Bridge in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, start thinking about where you might want to join to help advance these important priorities to continue to improve the experience for everyone – Docents, Staff, Members, and Visitors.  If you are interested in learning more or participating, you can log you interest via this 30 second survey (click here).

See you on the streets!

-Ross
rw****@ar**********.org

Links:

• March Docent Council Meeting Minutes
• Docent Task Force Participation Interest Survey (same link as above)

CLICK HERE for more stories on The Bridge.