Facing Hunger Community Event and Book Release (Fall 2014)
The bulk of my work for my internship with the Facing Project was split into two parts, the publishing of the stories and the planning of a community event and book release. The mission of the Facing Project is “connecting people through stories to strengthen communities”. Publishing the book was a way to hear and share the stories of members of the Manhattan community who were facing hunger. However, in order to really connect people with the hopes of building a stronger community, we needed a time and space to allow for people to hear and respond to these stories. As we started to plan our community event and book release, my supervisor and I used a series of Google Documents to keep track of and communicate about different details of the event.
One of the first things that we really thought about was our audience, who we wanted to be there, who we might be missing, and how we wanted to get them there. It was really easy to identify people who worked for organizations already addressing the issue of food insecurity and people generally really involved in the community. Our hope for the event, however, was not just to preach to people who were working in the trenches, but to create an opportunity for those who were working in and around the issue of food insecurity to connect with people in our community, both who have experienced hunger, and who have no idea food insecurity is an issue in our community. My supervisor and I created our initial list, consulted with Leadership Studies faculty and community partners, and then invited all of our guests to invite others as well, especially those that they would want to engage in this issue. Most notably, we asked our partners at the Flint Hills Breadbasket to invite their clients (including the people whose stories were told in the book). I reached out to our guest list through an email invite that included a description of the event and a short video representation of one of the stories as a type of “sneak peek”. Additionally, we created flyers that were distributed at two community meetings before the event. Aside from inviting specific individuals and organizations, we advertised for the event in our local newspaper and on a morning radio show the Friday before the event.
In determining what the actual program was going to look like on the day of the event, it was critical to prioritize details that mattered, that would contribute to the purpose. Something that my supervisor and I did early on in the planning stage was to call a meeting and invite others to brainstorm with us about what the event could be. Going into this meeting we knew that our event was going to be held at the Manhattan Arts Center and we knew that at least some of the stories were going to be shared in some format. Some important ideas that I took away from this meeting were 1) to be conscious of decorations that did not communicate a “celebration” of hunger but an awareness of it, 2) the opportunity and importance of collecting some kind of feedback or data, and 3) not seeing the event as the end of the road but as a continuing piece of the process. After this meeting, I contacted a local director to see if he would be interested in coordinating the presentation of the stories. He agreed, and my supervisor and I met twice with him before the event to share vision and align details. He recruited five other local actors to present the stories with him, planned and executed the order and arrangement of how the stories were shared, called a dress rehearsal, and ran that part of the program on the day of the event. This director proved to be a huge asset to our team. Largely due to his work, our audience was able to hear the stories. In order to give our audience a chance to respond and do something with this new information, we asked one of the Leadership Studies faculty members to facilitate a thirty-minute community dialogue immediately following the presentation of the stories. Additionally, remembering this theme of connecting people, it became important for us to find ways for our audience members to continue the conversation. We provided notecards for audience members to write their next steps on at the end of the facilitation, and then to bring with them to the next gallery room to pin up on our wall display.
In the side gallery room, I created a display that combined the Facing Project mission statement, significant quotes from each of the stories, and a place for audience members to pin up their notecards. Additionally, along the walls of the gallery we set up tables where we had invited specific nonprofit organizations and community partners to come and share what they do with the community and to have a conversation about what needs and opportunities they see. In the middle of the room, we set up high top tables for people to stand and mingle and enjoy refreshments. Choosing which refreshments to serve and how to serve them at a hunger event was one detail we spent a lot of time wrestling with. Speaking about food insecurity it was important to be intentional in what we served, and specifically in not wasting any of it. We did not want to have an extravagant spread, but also knowing that there was a possibility that there would be audience members there from the Breadbasket or others experiencing food insecurity we did not want to miss an opportunity to share food with someone who might have a hard time coming by it. In the end, we decided on basic cookies and whole apples and bananas (that could be taken to go).
Ministry Team (Fall 2014)
My senior year, I was asked to co-lead a ministry team for Christian Challenge. Ministry teams are a group of student leaders (who are pouring out in leading their own bible studies) who come together once a week to be poured into—to receive encouragement and training from staff members or older students. Christian Challenge is a very large campus ministry and it is not uncommon for ministry team members to not know each other before the year starts and they are placed in the same group. Knowing that this would most likely be true for our ministry team, my co-leader and I were very intentional in planning our first meeting knowing that it would have the potential to set the tone for the rest of the year. We started with our vision for the group—that God would use our time together to bring rest and encouragement to our team, that our group would be a safe and desirable place to come, and that we would be able to spur one another on. It was important to us that our team members would know that while we valued what they were doing as LIFE group leaders, that that is not all that we saw them as, but instead as whole people.
Having these things in mind, we began to make plans for our first night together. After considering a variety of ice breaker type games and activities, we decided to begin with a bonfire that would give our team members a common task (roasting marshmallows), opportunity for casual get-to-know-you chatter, and would allow them to work side by side first instead of face to face. We allotted about an hour to spend time together outside around the bonfire before moving inside, sharing a little bit about our vision, and then doing a more formal activity. In order to start to learn about each other at a deeper level, we planned to give everyone a sheet of printer paper and some crayons. Team members would fold their papers into four parts, and then draw their responses to four different questions about their childhood and loves, heroes, and life before college.
Apartment Tower Chili Dinner (Fall 2014)
During my senior year as a member of Mortar Board National Senior Honor Society, I had the privilege as serving as the Director of Community Service. At the beginning of the year when we were discussing vision and the type of impact we wanted to have in our year together, something that surfaced for my class was our desire to engage in deep and meaningful ways and to prioritize quality over quantity. What this looked like for community service was deepening an existing relationship with Apartment Tower, a public housing complex. Instead of serving one meal a semester at the complex as previous Mortar Board classes had done, we decided we would like to host monthly events of some kind. As the Director of Community Service, it was my job to plan the first (and all subsequent) events. Before planning our first event in October, I visited Apartment Tower and met with the housing manager. From our time together I was able to hear from him what he perceived some of the needs to be, what types of events had been successful in the past (for example more residents are likely to come if there is food and it would help if events were scheduled for the same night and week every month), and what space and resources would be available to us. I sent out a Doodle Poll to all of the Mortar Board members to determine what night of the week and time frame would work best for the majority of our members. From this poll, I determined that we would host a monthly event on the second Thursday of every month from 5:30-7pm.
Knowing that we wanted to serve a meal at the first event to attract the maximum number of members, we decided to begin with a chili dinner. Mortar Board operates on a yearly budget, so I went shopping for ingredients and cinnamon rolls based on the total given to me by our treasurer. Aside from this limited budget, another challenge in planning was estimating how many people would attend. Because it was our first event, I wanted to ensure that everything would go well, but it was important for me to delegate and share some of the preparatory work, including allowing some of the other members to bake cinnamon rolls and bring paper goods, small side items, and toppings. Beyond preparing food, I also planned different activities that we could do with the residents. The housing manager had hinted that most of the residents were single middle aged to elderly adults and it was important to me that any activities that I planned would be meaningful and engaging for adults and informed by their unique interests and not stereotypes or generalizations. It was a unique event from anything I had ever planned before in that we did not have a message or something to accomplish or get across during the event. Instead, the purpose of the event was to begin to establish and build relationships in a way that might inform future events.
process of managing all the details of a project or activity