So as most of you know Venue hosted a huge Easter Egg Hunt with some five thousand Airdrieites (real word) Easter Sunday which was a wonderful success.

Thank you to 63 donors, 19 vendors and all the volunteers that made this such a great event! We also would love to give a shoutout to the City for streamlining it for us and being amazing to work with! For our first year hosting I think our team knocked it out of the park.

I was just looking at an app we use to communicate with our Dream Team called Slack, and the #easterevent group was formed March 5.

For those of you with math brains who are now subtracting March 5 from April 21 I can save you the time: 47 days. (I had to count on my fingers)

Try organizing an event like that in 47 days with volunteers folks. Most of us can’t get our small children out of the house with socks and pants on, just sayin..

But I had a Scott. Scott took the project on and rallied help and businesses wherever he could find them. A team came together and executed a crazy playbook and pulled the event together.

In 47 days.

Do you want to know how it worked? We did a very unCanadian thing. We bought into a plan we didn’t all have a voice in creating. We didn’t have time.

Think Football. How does a team win a football game?

There is a huddle. A play is called. Everybody runs the play. Whether they touch the ball or not.

 

Does a player argue with the quarterback during the huddle because they don’t like the call? Not on a winning team.

Does a play itself get discussed in depth during a huddle? There’s no time. Aaaaand not on a winning team.

Does a player get to change their run because they didn’t “feel like” running a slant? That’s called an interception because the ball is thrown to where they should be.

Does a player sulk when their job is to draw the defence instead of receiving the pass? Again, not if they want field time and not if they want to play for a winning team.

I am currently shifting all of our teams at church around to get more wins for them. I want them to get addicted to winning and not addicted to everybody getting their own way or having their own domain. I don’t want my own domain if it means we lose the game, and when a church wins the lives of people get better.

So our approach was a very fast one and our team had terrific unity pulled off a win.

Did we get everything right? Again I’d remind the reader that their small children may not be wearing pants as we speak and that it’s easier to act like a consultant and criticize an event run by volunteers and sponsors who paid for it out of their own coffers than to lend a hand. But critics never actually do anything and are welcome to organize their own backyard Easter egg hunt where, once again their own children may or may not be wearing pants.

To be fair I did walk into the 0-5 hunt with at least two thousand people on the Bert practice field with Mayor Peter Brown and realize we were going to have a Lord of the Flies moment if we didn’t do something quick. We had some lovely volunteers who were starting to drop chocolate eggs on the ground but didn’t realize just how many people were there as the kids started to swarm.

It actually reminded me of a zombie outbreak and I thought “Shoot, somebody’s going to get eaten by mistake if we don’t do something quick!”

I had just walked through some thousands and knew more zombies were coming. I said “____! Do you have any idea how many kids are coming??”

She looked up, her eyes dilating slightly as the situation began to dawn on her.

Keeping in mind there’s no way to communicate in the middle of a field of hungry kids and some parents hungry for their kids to “WIN” the egg hunt and pushing them to get/steal as many eggs as possible (for reals Airdrie parents?:).

So I grabbed the mayor and as many people in gold shirts I could whistle at and pulled them into the middle of the field as the parents swarmed on their children’s behalf.

“Hey! Everybody grab a bin and walk it out from the middle dropping eggs as you go! Spread them out!! Make sure every kid gets some! And DON’T DIE!” (I added the last part in my head to avoid a panic. Volunteers being asked to sacrifice their lives for a free egg hunt should spend their last moments still believing in the goodness of society.

So Mayor Peter and I started running the eggs out. There were rumours that he may or may not have thrown some handle fulls in the air, but it would be impossible to verify or deny any accusations. At least he was enjoying his last moments.

Now to be fair, 99.9% of everybody was on their best behaviour in spite of a tweak in our playbook for next year. Pete from the Children’s Festival (June 1-2!!!) said to me after “Yeah, you have to separate them”

We did run the major hunt in the north field differently, we just kept the kids behind the line and spread them out and didn’t allow the parents out at all:) It worked much better. Our bad for not separating the parents from the children y’all. Our bad. Next year we’ll get it sorted.

But overall what a great day! For our team to host an event where 95% of everything was awesome first time out of the gate and at that scale, and children weren’t lost (Again, you probably don’t know where at least one of your children are right now…), I’m so proud of our team and everyone involved!

Thanks Airdrie!