Relationship Builder
creates mutual understanding, affiliation, connection, and interaction between or among individuals that are of benefit to the common good
Facing Project Internship (Summer-Fall 2014)
The mission of the Facing Project is “connecting people through stories to strengthen communities”. My entire internship was an exercise in relationship building. The book we published was a way to hear and share the stories of members of the Manhattan community who were facing hunger. Our hope for this project was not just to preach to people who were already 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. The book, the stories it contained, was a means to create mutual understanding. It is easy to argue against or to ignore statistics. Instead of just looking at the fact that x percent of our population is food insecure, the project introduces you to the story of a mother who has eighteen cents and no idea what she will feed her child tomorrow for breakfast. It is much harder to argue against or devalue the reality of her experience.
While I think the project definitely promotes individual connection and affiliation, more importantly its structure prompts corporate action. There is purpose, an appeal to the common good, in believing that standing next to a neighbor and taking an honest look at one’s community can be translated into real efforts to build a stronger community. This was really the second half of my internship. Once the book was published, my supervisor and I turned our attention to creating a time and space to allow for people to hear and respond to these stories. At our community event and book release we invited people to the Manhattan Arts Center to hear six of the stories performed. After that, we invited everyone to move to the side gallery to continue the conversation. In this room, I created a visual display of the mission statement along with a place for people to hang up their notecards with their next steps written on them. 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. In order for all of this to happen, I had to be intentional in the relationships I was creating with the people who contributed to the book and community partners who informed our work and were present to talk to audience members at the event. But that was just one layer. The purpose of all of the relationships that I built was to allow for further connection and engagement of other community members.
Facing Hunger Book Contributor (Fall 2014)
The summer after my junior year, I had the privilege of joining with one of the faculty members of the Staley School of Leadership Studies on a project she had begun through the Facing Project. The Facing Project is a national nonprofit whose mission is, “connecting people through stories to strengthen communities.” Essentially, the national nonprofit provides a toolkit to help partner communities engage in a storytelling project to address whichever issue or concern they feel is most essential or strategic for their community to “face”. My faculty supervisor had begun the project the previous fall identifying the issue of hunger in our community. That spring, she mobilized her class to go to a local food pantry to interview and collect the stories of members of the Manhattan community who were experiencing food insecurity.
When I began this internship, I was captured by the beauty and the value of a story. As I began to edit the stories and format them into a book I realized I felt responsible for not only the words on the paper, but the accurate portrayal of a real person, and the part I was really struggling with was the community’s perception and response to this person. It felt really vulnerable to share this work with other people, to give them something that I had invested deeply in, and to allow them to form their own judgments and assign their own value. Towards the end of the formatting process, I was responsible for contacting the university’s provost to see if she would be willing to write the foreword for the book. The provost had no prior exposure to the project, but did have a history of working in and around the issue of food insecurity. In my email to her and follow up meeting, I was intentional about acknowledging and asking questions about her prior work, making connections between her interests and the mission of the Facing Project, and inviting her to partner with us in starting a conversation about hunger in Manhattan. By asking questions about her past work and current interests, I was able to create a common ground and affiliation. In my genuine curiosity I was able to affirm some of the work she has done and the meaning it has. Based on this level of relationship and mutual understanding I was able to ask her to write a foreword that drew upon her expertise and influence to give readers a broader perspective of the book and where it fits in the arena of food insecurity.
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 planned our first night together. After considering a variety of icebreaker type games and activities, we decided to start the night with a bonfire. Our team members arrived and were given a common task (roasting marshmallows), opportunity for casual get-to-know-you chatter, and were allowed to work side-by-side first instead of face to face. We spent about an hour together outside around the bonfire before moving inside, sharing a little bit about our vision, and then doing a more formal activity. Sharing our vision allowed the chance to create some mutual understanding about who we were as a group and our purpose in coming together. In order to start to learn about each other at a deeper level, we gave everyone a sheet of printer paper and some crayons. Team members folded their papers into four parts, and then drew their responses to four different questions about their childhood and loves, heroes, and life before college. This activity not only provided interaction in sharing and listening to one another’s stories, but also the opportunity for connection and affiliation based on shared experiences.