Mortar Board Reading is Power Event (Fall 2014)
My senior year I had the pleasure of being a member of Mortar Board, a national senior honor society. As a national organization, Mortar Board has three central ideals (scholarship, leadership, and service) and a national campaign that all chapters participate in in some capacity. The national campaign is called “Reading is Leading” and its purpose is to promote reading and literacy among youth. For our chapter, the service committee was responsible for determining how we would promote youth literacy in our own community. The chairperson for this event developed a plan to host a community super-hero themed reading event for Manhattan youth. Other chapters have done some type of book drive for their service. During one of our committee meetings, members were discussing the possibility of incorporating a book drive with our event by asking people who come to the event to bring a book to donate to be given to other kids who do not have access to books. A potential danger that I identified and shared during this meeting was that we might be asking kids who do not have books to bring something to donate, when they themselves are the ones in need of receiving a book of their own. A distinction that I asked my committee to make was whether or not we were trying to fundraise from or for this specific demographic. After weighing this potential cost, we decided it would be of more harm than good to incorporate a book drive within our event. Instead of focusing advertising and resources on collecting and redistributing books, we chose to prioritize fun and engaging activities open to everyone that promoted a love of reading.
Facing Hunger Community Event Refreshments (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. Choosing which refreshments to serve and how to serve them at a hunger event was one detail my supervisor and I spent a lot of time wrestling with. To begin, we asked whether or not we should serve at all. My supervisor shared the experience of having been to hunger conferences before and noting with peers the abundant spreads of food and wondering what has happening with all of the leftovers. We recognized this, serving and wasting an abundance of food, as a potential danger that could harm our event and people’s ability to see and respond to the food insecurity present in our community. As we thought about not serving food at all, we identified a potential harm and potential loss. The harm we foresaw was a potential unease, and perhaps feeling of guilt or shame if we were to not serve any food at all. Our goal for the event was not to make people feel guilty for an afternoon for what they had, but instead to connect people, to engage them in a conversation about food insecurity, but also about what a stronger community might look like. Knowing that we hoped to have people who were currently experiencing food insecurity in our audience, a potential loss that we identified in not serving any refreshments would be a missed opportunity to serve them food and meet one basic need in that moment. Having eliminated the idea of not serving any food at all, my supervisor and I turned our attention to different ways of presenting the food. We discussed serving certain types or amounts of food (based on what would be available in day of food stamps, at a food pantry, etc.) but again, did not want to shame or embarrass different members of our audience. To reduce the risk or impression of waste, we thought it would be beneficial for the food to be in form that people could take leftovers with them. In the end, we decided on basic cookies (a common refreshment for afternoon events) and whole apples and bananas (that could be taken to go). I contacted a local grocery store to ask them to donate the fruit and then purchased the cookies from the K-State Bakery Science club.
LEAD 212 Communication Error (Fall 2013)
In the Introduction to Leadership Concepts class that I helped teach, each learning community (approximately twelve students) is assigned an area of Manhattan and asked to execute a canned food collection to be donated to the Flint Hills Breadbasket. The students are provided some information as far as context about the Breadbasket and the history of this food drive, neighborhood assignment, and deadline. Other than that, the students are left to mobilize themselves to reach the community, communicate about the event, and to collect cans. My small group decided to make flyers about the canned food drive and to place them on people’s doors and return at a later time to actually collect the cans. Due to a proactive community member reaching out to the Staley School of Leadership Studies, my lead teacher and then myself learned that the flyers did not include information about a pick-up date and time. The woman expressed that she would love to donate, but would like to know what day to leave food out for the students to come by and pick up.
When I learned this from my lead teacher, immediately I began to identify and try to name the potential harms and losses caused by this lack of information. The most tangible and immediate consequence I thought of was a probable decrease in the amount of cans donated due to lack of information. Next, I thought about what community members’ perceptions might be of my learning community. I wondered if community members’ would differentiate between this one group and the Staley School of Leadership Studies as a whole, or if this would change their impression of the school. I wondered if this one action might damage a long relationship between the School and community, and even if community members would go so far as to connect this to the Flint Hills Breadbasket (the nonprofit we were doing the canned food drive for). As a class leader, my role was not to “fix” or “do” for my small group, but to create space and opportunity for them to exercise leadership. In this instance, my role was to help them walk through this process of identifying and assessing potential costs and then to consider the best possible way to reengage. Specifically, I challenged my students to consider how they might take this failed communication effort and turn it in to an opportunity to get more face time in the community and to demonstrate how much they care about and believe in the cause.
identification, assessment, and prioritization of danger, harm or loss followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or maximization of realized opportunities