Friday morning, I represented matchstick at the February meeting of Creative Mornings Charleston, a free breakfast “lecture” event series that brings together the creative community in Charleston for breakfast and ideas. For this event, we were all instructed to BYOC (Bring Your Own Cereal); milk, spoons, and bowls were provided and we were encouraged to bring multiple boxes, as all unopened boxes of cereal were to be donated to the Lowcountry Food Bank.
This month’s meeting featured Dana Beach of the Coastal Conservation League as its speaker and the theme of the lecture was “climate.”
We arrived in the frigid air at the Charleston Library Society on King Street and I was given a name tag and asked if I wanted to participate in the “secret challenge.” My younger self, who’d always wanted to be on a Nickelodeon game show like G.U.T.S. or Double Dare was all “hell yes” and I received my secret challenge name tag (spoiler alert: I ended up not being chosen for the secret challenge. Story of my life).
Coffee was provided by Counter Culture Coffee and Jericho Advisors provided all of the cereal accoutrements that we enjoyed. There was a brief networking period where we all had the chance to defrost and enjoy the delicious breakfast spread before we sat down to hear Dana Beach speak.
(although I did find it interesting that they used Styrafoam bowls at an event where the guest speaker was from the Coastal Conservation League).
Before Dana spoke, we got to hear from Sophie Treppendahl (the Creative Mornings Charleston host) and explain how awesome it is to be part of the Creative Mornings community. Right now, there are 105 cities that are participating in the CM events worldwide, which is very exciting.
The "Secret Challenge" turned out to be "Rapid-Fire Pictionary" and 6 random participants were chosen to get up and draw or guess phrases that related to the "climate" theme. Everyone who participated received a little gift from Artist & Craftsman Supply, and it was really fun to watch everyone try to draw things like "Chocolate Rain" and "Funnel Cloud" in under 30 seconds. I was bummed that I wasn't able to participate because it's always been a dream of mine to play Pictionary on a giant drawing board like they do in the movies. I suppose I could just buy my own giant drawing board, but where's the fun in that?
Dana was really interesting to listen to. He talked mainly about how cities stopped using the grid system to plan out cities and why urban sprawl is bad. He also talked a bit about how “smart growth” is a better option as it will reduce the environmental and personal impacts of continued, unchecked sprawl.
I met a lot of really interesting people and I can’t wait for next month’s event! If you want to be a part of it, head over to the Creative Mornings Charleston website and sign up for a free account to get the details of the next gathering. All I know is that the theme is “ink” and it’s going to be on March 27th. I hope to see you there!
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