Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

Newsletter – Summer 2018 41
I talked about “rough” estimations when we put up
“calculations” in the budget for the other budget items. The cost for
the congress organisation was also fixed at 19.000€, total fixed
214.000€.
The complete budget sum for the symposium totalled up to
321.000€, leaving a “rest” of 107.000€.
The unknown “rest” of the budget and strict
discipline in honorary work and paying keynote
speakers only (and only moderately)
We decided to calculate separate budgets for the gala dinner/
evening, which was initially 40.000€. We had agreed that the gala
evening was a local task and decisions could be fixed later. The target
again was that the Gala Evening should have its own budget and also
break even. Anyway, it was unrealistic to prepare such an event at a
rented location with dinner and some music and dancing for the
expected fee of 90€. We had decided to support a solidarity fee of 60€
for up to 100 participants from the symposium budget (this would
cover a Gala deficit of 3000€) and also started a donation campaign to
raise money for “partnerships”, allowing invitations to the evening for
participants/bursary applicants who could not afford the price.
The “rest” of the symposium budget was in detail:
The variable sum for printing (later in addition: graphic design) and
website totalled 26.000€ and I had no idea how this would work out.
G+R always alerted us that this would not be enough.
There was a lot of attention and time spent on Keynote
Speaker's travel cost and honorarium. I learned about the usual
procedure about this at GASi even though to me I never had the
impression it was really clear. We decided to have one keynote
speaker for each day, i.e. 5 keynote speakers. Each would receive
travel cost and one night of hotel accommodation and an honorarium
of 1000€ for the lecture. The respondents would receive a 250€
honorarium for their work on the response but would have to pay
everything else for their participation. Frances was very helpful in
putting this out very clear and she also made clear that it would be an
important and hard task to stand against any attempts of doing another
way. She encouraged and urged me to be “strict” in this regard and I
tried to be so. So, the total for budget item 9 was 13.400€. This seemed
a core item for the symposium quality to me, but it was less than 4%
of the budget put up in June 2015 which ran up to 321.000€.
It was also clear that all committee members, even the chairs,