Long time no see...

Well, hello there! Fancy running into you here. I haven't been here lately myself — have you? Ah, well, you've probably been busy too. I sure have.

Apart from an explosion of work, I've spent the past several months being a Full Time Daughter as my mother landed in and out of hospital with health issues of increasing severity. It's been a sobering education on many fronts — not least being the confrontation with mortality, which most of us would rather avoid. But the good news is: we both survived! My mother is back home now and doing much better, I'm finally able to breathe again, and we're both keeping our fingers crossed that things stay this way for awhile.

Talking about mortality, in between everything else I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert (♥♥♥) and realized that the first time I saw him in concert was...half my lifetime ago!! Talk about sobering. Well, he is still THE BOSS — and I still have my rock & roll spirit. So all is not lost in my world.

Oh, and I did some work too! Actually, a lot of work. And what follows are the fruits of my labour. First up: some charts I did for a terrific conference on food security earlier this year. Food security isn't a topic I knew a lot about going into the conference, but I was able to sit in on a few sessions that I didn't have to record, and I learned a lot! That's one of the things I love about this work — I get to go to all kinds of interesting events and learn about things I didn't know much about before. Or learn more about things I did know something about. And, of course, meet all kinds of interesting people in the process.

Below are the charts from the World Cafe sessions that took place each afternoon of the conference. Here is the World Cafe 'harvest' from Day 1:



















And here's Day 2:



















An added bonus of this conference was the opportunity to collaborate with my great friend Ali Grant, who is a most engaging facilitator (with a gorgeous Scottish accent) and a terrific creative partner. This is another aspect of this work that just delights me: the fact that I get to team up with some of the brightest, most thoughtful people around and co-create processes for change together. What I learn from my colleagues on the job is priceless!