So…I am on a small committee planning a retirement party for two teaching colleagues. About 100 people initially…and at the beginning of June…initially.
Clearly, that’s not going to be able to happen now. We would like to celebrate the long teaching careers of these two folks in some way…and we are looking for ideas.
One will be moving OOS as of sometime this summer, most likely.
Ideas we have so far…
- A money gift to each of them. Invites would indicate we would like to give a nice $$ gift and any donation would be appreciated.
Any other creative ideas??
Things we don’t want to do…no Zoom party. These folks have been using online teaching tools, and we don’t want to have that as a celebration!
No car parade. They don’t even live in the same town.
Ask everyone who would have been invited to send a very short video to you. Download an app like Inshot which makes it SUPER easy to compile short videos into one. Send it along with the collected gift money to the retirees. You could also send it to all 100 to view!
Depending on the response (do you receive 50 videos? 20? 80?) you might have to consider making a few Inshot videos. But what a nice memory to have.
The family I saw that recently did it for a birthday were then able to view it on their tv big screen. Very fun.
When my daughter turned 21, we had 21 cards sent to her with money, and with a shared memory of what was special. She loved it!!! She took pictures of all of the cards together, arriving from everywhere!
Just an idea. Mail is always fun to receive.
Can you do a series of celebrations in person for small groups that don’t violate the gathering rules in your community (assuming the SIP order is lifted or loosened)?
Vidhug is apparently really easy to use. I believe no one has to download apps or anything. It automatically turns it into a single video for the recipient.
My friends and I, who live all over the world, each did a personal video message to our friend in England on her 60th birthday a few years ago. Her H organized the whole thing.
She was thrilled beyond words.
Since we aren’t in the office and can’t “pass around a card to sign”, last week a co-worker set up an online greeting card using groupgreeting.com and we could all go in and sign. It was really cute. She was able to pick a scheduled time that it will be delivered to the recipient…
@Massmomm
Not sure how we would divide up into smaller groups. We had enough trouble finding one date that worked for these retirees. Finding multiple dates would be problematic.
Our state currently has groups of 5 or less…we expected over 100 at this party. That would be at least 20 “smaller” events. Not really possible.
@JustaMom5465 I like the online card idea…maybe we could do something like that coupled with a delivery of a gift of $$$.
That’s what we did…it was for a baby shower. Everyone contributed towards an Amazon gift card.
You could do a card collection or something like a recipe (memory, photo) collection made into a book.
The issue we have is these are all staff members dealing with distance learning for now. Our committee has decided we can’t really ask them to do anything additional right now.
So…the current plan is to send an email out saying that plans are on hold for now, and that we will celebrate these two retirements once school has ended…somehow…TBD.
The committee liked the short video clip idea and our IT person is awesome…but right now she is dealing with issues everyday related to the online distance learning. So…we will patiently wait.