When I first got elected as Lonestar Region’s 40th Moreh, one of the things I was most looking forward to was coordinating a convention. I knew that coordinating MIT/AIT fell under the job of Moreh and I couldn’t be more excited to get to take my convention experience to the next level. 

After installs in January, we didn’t waste any time and started our coordinator meetings in February. Meeting once a week seemed easy enough at first, but I quickly learned that there was a lot more work to it. From organizing steering meetings to figuring out the logistics behind every program, coordinating Spring Convention for one of the largest delegations in the order was much more complicated than I thought. Through it all, I was lucky enough to have the best staff in the world helping us and the best counterpart ever to bounce ideas off of, Talia Septimus. 

We jumped headfirst into planning, deciding on a Maccabiah theme for the convention after Talia and I remembered our MIT/AIT had a super fun Maccabiah we wanted to replicate for the new eighth graders. I thought it was the perfect way to get the new members engaged and introduced to the entire region, mixing up the MIT/AITs into six colored teams based on their big/little pairs. We also couldn’t have done it without our steering committee, who helped us surpass our convention goal of 325 members, winning us a double-layer cookie cake! 

From long weekday nights in meetings to seeing it all come together in May, I have never been prouder of something I had a small hand in bringing to fruition. Although not everything went according to plan with uncontrollable factors such as the weather, I learned valuable life lessons from coordinating, like sometimes life throws you curveballs, and you have to adapt. And adapt we did, successfully leading what became one of my favorite weekends of the year. I especially felt proud of leading AZA Separates with the rest of my 40’s boys, something that was incredibly meaningful and brought my BBYO experience full circle, as I think we can all remember our first BBYO Separates. I was honored to get the chance to help bring that same experience to others.