Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

Newsletter – Summer 2018 39
Berlin GASi Symposium: Reflections of the
Local Treasurer
By Robert Ohlrich
The Start of the campaign: Not knowing and trust
Apart from a training in business administration more than 30 years
ago and the work as student helper at an oncology conference more
than 20 years ago there was nothing similar I did before. I agreed to
take the “job” as local treasurer being part of the Berlin enterprise
2017 in autumn 2014, very soon after the start of the Berlin campaign
before and at the Lisbon GASi symposium. The work of building the
structures to organize the symposium and to set up the initial contracts
has been described by the chairs (Pieter, Gerda, Kurt) and Robi. I
thought of the enterprise as an adventure I wanted to undertake. I
trusted especially Kurt and Pieter in Berlin and learned to trust my
international colleagues whom I got to know in the process. Kurt
ensured me all the time that he knew “how to do it” and everything
would work out fine. Robi ensured me that there had been previous
GASi symposia and that they have a good basis in their membership
and interested participants from very many countries that would carry
us. Robi decided that I should be part of the Management Symposium
Committee (MSC) which I surely did not expect in the beginning but
was a very good thing. In the process I could really take on more or
less the whole financial responsibility and felt increasingly that I could
manage it. I did not expect in the beginning that international and
German colleagues would trust me so much, but they did.
The process of setting up the budget: huge fixed
amounts and rough estimations about the rest
Pieter and Kurt have reported about the work on the first contract of
cooperation between the ‘Berliner Institute for Gruppenanalyse’
(BIG), the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gruppenanalyse und
Gruppenpsychotherapie’ (D3G) and GASi. This took quite some
months, and symposium committees started – to my memory – to be
complete around April 2015. I had a first contact with Frances
Griffiths, GASi hon. Treasurer at the time. There were some figures
and statistics about money, numbers of participants and bursaries at
the Lisbon symposium but no budget structure and how the result was
achieved. Frances and I started to discuss the budget and we had a
good cooperation in putting up a budget structure and some