We ran a successful 3-day family reunion for 55 people in a state no one lives in. Here’s my story.
To start, there were 44 people who did not make it to the event. I was always going to consider this successful even if only 5 people came. 55 people was a tremendous turnout. One testament to how successful a weekend it was is how people extended their stays an extra day and skipped out on work/money because they were having such a wonderful time.
I’m going to split this post up into 4 parts. I will talk about the reunion itself, how we made it happen, next steps for the next reunion and beyond, and then wrap up with my general thoughts.
The reunion
From Thursday, July 4th to Sunday, July 7th, my mom’s side of the family got together for a weekend at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. We all stayed at the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott, which had great amenities, an incredibly helpful and friendly staff, and was not directly on the beach but was right near all sorts of other things (groceries, outlets, food options, and close to all the beaches). On Thursday evening, there were about 16 people there at the hotel. On Friday, about 40-45 people made it. By Saturday, we had 55 people. Eight of my mom’s nine brothers and sisters were able to make it, the other sibling was at their childhood home in Bangladesh.
We intentionally planned out only one event per day. This way people could get together for one event, but be able to go at their own pace the rest of the time and do their own thing as they pleased. Thursday’s event was the 4th of July fireworks at Dewey Beach, Friday’s event was Jummah prayer followed by lunch at Blackwall Hitch (walking distance to beach), Saturday’s event was a family PowerPoint presentation with a catered lunch and birthday party. This worked out great. Breakfast was already provided by the hotel. Lunch was our choice since it’s most hot outside around noon, and brown people don’t have a great interest in getting very dark. Friday’s lunch was at 2:30 PM, which also ended up working out well because there was a communication and reservation mishap between the restaurant and me, but they were able to accommodate a large group since 2:30 was a quiet time for them. Saturday’s lunch was sponsored by a family member, and the restaurant delivered the food to the hotel and set it up.
I cannot stress enough. The hotel was super clutch throughout the entire weekend and leading up to it as well. We had the conference room booked for Saturday afternoon. On Friday, we asked if we could use the conference room for the Friday Jummah prayer. They were like, yeah no worries, and actually it’s open the whole weekend so you can feel free to use it whenever. This led to so many special moments of people spending time together in the conference room and also being able to eat meals there at our leisure.
The PowerPoint was really great and touching. There were six parts to it: the slideshow, the remembrance, the interviews, the vision for the family reunions, the family charity, and open discussion. My cousins put together a 20-minute slideshow of old pictures that were buried in people’s photobooks, and people watched this while they were eating lunch. They also put together a 15-minute video interviewing the nine siblings. The remembrance portion was taking time to think about the people who have passed but made this all possible, and saying a prayer about them and us. I led the vision portion and discussed what I saw and believed for the whole thing, and what I hoped everyone would take away from the weekend. For the family charity part, another cousin was informing everyone on the idea, what they are thinking about, and how they plan to execute it. The presentation ended by opening the floor and letting people speak their feelings. The whole lunch ended with a birthday cake cutting and a family photo (at the top of this post).
In terms of communication for the entire weekend, we had probably ten touchpoints (there were various smaller ones, but these are the high-level ones that pushed the event forward):
- Initial discussion and show of interest
- Initial survey sent out – October ‘18
- Save-the-date card and information sheet mailed out – January ‘19
- Bugging people to reserve their room for about 5-6 months, and sending a reminder out once a month
- Sending out the itinerary + schedule + guest list for the weekend to everyone – I believe it was May or June ’19
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Created a WhatsApp group for disseminating important information
- Next time, I’d make two groups. A closed one where one person shares the agenda, and another for everybody to post pictures and be able to comment on throughout the weekend.
- Communicated the agenda for each day through WhatsApp, and also the agenda for the PowerPoint
The whole weekend was considered successful by everyone. I think what made it successful is that people didn’t care about where they were, just that everyone was in the same place able to spend time together. I think not having to worry about how long you had to talk with one person helped everyone relax and be in a great mood, which carried throughout the weekend. There’s this whole thing where if everyone is blissed out in a good mood, you can’t do anything wrong. Or at least, no problem can’t be solved.
A few lessons learned here.
- July 4th weekend is actually not a good weekend to do any sort of big event like this, as people apparently don’t want to use their holiday PTO on a family gathering. The second or third week of July is better.
- The other lesson is that when doing a big event like this, pick a place that isn’t more than 30-minutes-to-an-hour-away from an airport. If it’s further away, you are likely excluding people from coming who live further away.
- A positive lesson learned: four days is ideal. The first day is everyone getting settled in from traveling and saying hi, the second day is everyone adapting to the mood and surroundings, the third day is like a celebration, and the fourth day is saying goodbye.
From ideation to reality
There had been talk about a family reunion for a long time. The interest was there, but no one ever really took the lead. By a confluence of events, I decided to grab it by the horns and take it on. I knew that I needed a couple of other people, as three people is critical in showing you’re serious and also in being able to avoid split decisions. One of my cousins is very communicative with everyone in the family, and then she suggested involving the other cousin. So off we went.
It started by getting everyone’s information. Name, phone number, home address, and email address. Then, we sent out a survey asking for that information (mainly to gather email address), and an additional question asking if people would prefer a beach, lake, or city. Afterwards, we settled on beach and picked a beach city that would be a middle point for everyone. There’s a Maryland faction and a New Jersey one, so Rehoboth Beach, Delaware seemed like a good choice. We looked through hotels, settled on one, picked dates, got in touch with the hotel, they setup a family reunion rate for us, then we took all of that information and sent it to people with a save-the-date card.
At this point, we essentially had to make a plan of how we’d go about recruiting people to this event. We started with our own families. Once we got our parents and families onboard, we could use that as leverage to invite others. There were a couple of families we could instantly count on for being in, that was just a simple call to tell them this was happening and how they could book. After that is when the pulling of teeth started, and of essentially begging people to come. At a certain point, you do all you can, and then people decide if they are going to come or not. Eventually, some people who weren’t planning on coming ended up coming because people talked about how great it was and they were having FOMO.
You have to remember, people didn’t understand what we were trying to do. They were very skeptical. These people NEVER take vacations together. They pretty much only meet elsewhere for an extended period of time if there’s a wedding. Getting them to grasp that they could spend 3 days together killing time was a very foreign concept. Of course, we were met with resistance (“The hotel is too expensive”, “I would rather be anywhere else on 4th of July than with family”, “This is going to be a disaster”, “I am having health issues and can’t make it”, etc. etc. etc.).
I don’t mention that last part because it bugs me or anything. I’m a firm believer that if you have a strong intent and reason for pursuing something, the light will always shine through. In this instance, that’s what ended up happening. We’re kind of fortunate as a family to all be in good financial states, so money isn’t really an issue. We were doing this because, for example, my grandfather was dead before I was even born. My grandmother died when I was a child and I don’t have any real memories of talking to her. These are people who have been influential to my life without me even knowing it. Losing that feeling or not making the best of times with all of those people in my family would be an unnecessarily, massive net negative for everyone’s life. So, the underlying thoughts are: what are you driven by?; what do you spend your time thinking about?; what do you spend your time acting on?; and how do you get others to understand your intentions (good or bad) to act in the way you want them to?
Anyways, after we sent out the itinerary and schedule, a couple of people showed interest in taking on the family charity part. Of course, I was so happy to hear that because someone was willing to take ownership of the idea and run with it. Being able to delegate things out and trust people to do those things is critical in getting something like this to happen. If it doesn’t go well, oh well. But you need all the help you can get. Like, I was more than happy to hand off Saturday’s lunch to a cousin because it was their daughter’s birthday, and they wanted to pay for it. I told them, just let me know the name of the place you order food from so I can let everyone know, and let me know if you need any help.
It was also important to delegate things as I live in Alabama, and we have family in Maryland and New Jersey. The part about getting pictures and videos of people would have required me to physically be there and spend a lot of time gathering disparate parts. I can’t really afford to do that, so yeah none of this would’ve been possible without everyone pitching in. However, I definitely wanted to make sure I stayed on top of everyone to make sure they completed the tasks they accepted responsibility for. Being a project manager for a living definitely helped me throughout this whole process.
The last thing I want to talk about here, and this was always tough, was that we had to draw the line that this reunion was only for members of my mom’s side of the family. Only spouses were allowed, and no other outside relatives. I had to keep this mentality for things like the remembrance slide, since yeah it’s sad people died, but they aren’t within the framework we’re trying to set. I have no problem making things clear. I’d rather people know and understand the exclusivity than not set the boundary and let people take advantage. My worry was always that other people would come, they wouldn’t fit in or would be bored, and then the person who brought them would have to essentially take care of them for the weekend, which would take away from the actual family member’s special quality time we were trying to set up and put them in place for.
Next steps
I’ll keep this section brief and bulleted:
- Next reunion – July 15th-18th, 2021 at the Poconos
- Reserve places to stay on January 2nd, 2021
- Provide general estimate of costs to people soon
- Finish gathering historical information questionnaire data and input into spreadsheet
- Make and update project documentation (want to create repeatable process)
- Finish up project communications plan (same about creating repeatable process)
- Digitize family tree, get it reviewed for accuracy, then send to people/post on website
- Getting old pictures and videos digitized/sent to everyone
- Setting up family website – sections for family tree, media, events and event information, the subcommittees/who to talk to about what, the cookbook, place to donate to our charity + voting on where the money goes to, etc.
- Set up charity plus setup email address for charity
- Create subcommittees like one group of three oversees family charity, one group manages communications/social media, etc.
- Appointing officers to the subcommittees
- Decision documents – keeping track of major decision points for each subcommittee and why we made those decisions
- Non-reunion events – anything outside of the biennial July event.
- Cookbook – collection of recipes for everyone’s specialty dish.
- Come up with ideas for shirts/maybe have a family-themed design competition
My thoughts
We move through stormy weather
We know that our days are few
We dream and we struggle together
And love will carry us through
“Drift While You’re Sleeping” by Ghosts of the Forest
I cried or welled up a handful of times this weekend and leading up to it. It felt like everything was coming together, and I still can’t believe everything went so well and was so well-accepted. Everything I envisioned actually happened pretty much as expected.
Doing a little reflecting on what I learned about myself and also what I took away, I am pretty great at wrangling a large group of people and being a leader as a social driver. I never really realized it was a big deal, since for example I’ve been running 50+ people March Madness pools since I was in high school. Another thing I appreciate about myself is that, as someone whose mind never stops racing (for better or worse), I am very good about ideating something out of nothing and running with it. This year for me has been a lot of bringing those ideas from just ideation into execution/reality. I for a long time didn’t realize that people weren’t able to understand my real intentions, and that was happening because I always spoke in sarcasm or joked around. I needed to actually start speaking and acting like what I actually felt. One idea that came out of that mindset and also with this family reunion was wanting to write a book about my grandfather, who I never knew but was such an incredible man that the thought of him brings people to tears or gives them chills.
For me, a lot of this stemmed from Phish and Trey Anastasio, whose well I continue to gain inspiration from in so many ways and implement in all facets of my life. A couple of weeks ago I went on tour for a few nights, and the happiness I felt from being at those shows for three nights in a row and the other shows I’ve been to over the last seven years was something I always wanted to pass onto people in my own life. The three other Phish-related events that really led to me wanting to pursue this were the Baker’s Dozen in 2017 (they played 13 shows in 17 nights at Madison Square Garden without repeating a song), the Sustain show in Atlanta in April 2018 (in memory of Trey’s friend Chris Cottrell whose funeral was earlier that day), and the Labor Day Dick’s run in Denver in 2018. It was this combination of pursuing something that has never happened and also which people will tell you not to do because it is a dumb idea. That’s kind of where the fun is, to push the envelope and prove people wrong. But you’re not doing it to prove people wrong, you’re just so driven by your intent that everything else falls into place. That intent is love, friendship, awareness of death, etc. If your intent is in the right place, other people will feel that, be drawn to it, put into the experience, and gain inspiration from it in their own ways.
That people were able to take that away from the weekend brought me so much joy. Getting the acceptance and support from everyone was such a great feeling once they understood what we were trying to do. This was always about the feeling. Whatever that feeling is depends on who you ask, as it was also about letting people experience what they wanted to and get what they wanted out of it. It is not about me, or anyone in particular, it’s about the whole picture. People will always add to it in ways they think is meaningful.
The feeling for me, though? It’s the feeling of not being confused. I am born American, I will always be and look Bengali. Inching towards understanding that heritage a little bit more is extremely fulfilling. And for some reason, no matter how frustrated you get with people, when everyone’s in the same place at the same time, everything just always works out. You feel a major sense of comfort, your worries are washed away, and you find yourself present in the moment with a happy and positive attitude. It’s like, this is where I’m supposed to be right now.
We’re all here together and the weather’s fine
Dancing in a dream and we’re free of time
The lights are flashing and the waves are crashing
Dancing in a dream beneath the sea of stars
“Beneath a Sea of Stars Part 1” by Ghosts of the Forest