Everybody Counts Debrief and Planning Committee (Fall 2014)
In the course of working on my nonprofit internship with the Facing Project, I had the opportunity to attend the Everybody Counts event held in August in Manhattan. This event was spearheaded by an outreach pastor at one of the local churches and was the second of its kind, with the first being held in January in conjunction with the homeless population count. The second event in August was paired with a school supply giveaway and thus broadened its scope from homeless to a larger demographic of individuals in need. After attending the event and spending time connecting and talking with the primary organizer, he invited me to attend a debrief about the event with other service agencies, churches, and community organizations who had participated in the event. It was incredible for me to be able to attend this meeting and witness an organization, or rather affiliation of organizations, in the beginning stages of strategic planning. The primary “tool” used to initiate and begin this work was a facilitator who was not directly involved in the event and had no real stake. His primary task was to uncover what function the Everybody Counts event had served thus far, how effectively it had done so, what function it might serve in the future, and whose work it might be to continue. There were a lot of different factions in the room and it was interesting to watch individuals openly and privately wrestle with that tension of viewing things from the lens of his or her own organization and its needs while also trying to look at the broader community and its needs. Certain themes emerged, but it was difficult to identify a singular and united “desired future”. Without that, it was also difficult to organize the present and know what work needed to be done and by whom. The facilitator asked the group to consider whether the work of planning the Everybody Counts event could be done by an existing system (Riley County Council of Social Agencies, United Way, etc.) or if a new system (possibly of members within the room) needed to be created to advance this work.
LIFE Group Leader (Fall 2012-Spring 2015)
As a sophomore, junior, and senior I served on the Christian Challenge leadership team. My primary responsibilities in this role were to colead a weekly bible study (LIFE group) and meet with girls one-on-one in disciple relationships. Ultimately, the mission of Christian Challenge is “infusing the world with life by training students to be people of G.R.A.C.E. who treasure Christ”. As an organization, Christian Challenge has largely laid out their strategic plan in the G.R.A.C.E. acronym which stands for the following:
G—Understanding and experiencing the Gospel of Grace.
R—Solidifying a loving and trusting Relationship with God and others.
A—Taking Action to advance God’s Kingdom.
C—Growing more like Jesus in Character and lifestyle.
E—Putting forth Effort to know God and make him known.
Christian Challenge’s full time staff uses this acronym to plan for our corporate time together on Thursday nights, topical teaching series, recruitment and interviewing of potential student leaders, and instruction provided to student leaders in our week of training before school, weekly ministry team gatherings, and monthly leadership training meetings. As a student leader, I then have a lot of freedom and responsibility to determine what I will do to help the students I am leading and investing in grow in these areas. When I meet weekly with my co-leaders to plan for our life group time, we look through the lens of this acronym to determine how we spend our time weekly and what we study. This last year, leading a freshman group, we recognize that a lot of our girls are hungry for relationships and a desire to be known. Taking that into consideration, we allow more time for community building (playing games, eating snacks, sharing about our weeks) than I have in the past for groups of upperclassmen. In order to understand the gospel and grow more like Jesus in character, a lot of what we do in life group is centered on studying the bible. Understanding the gospel and growing in character like Jesus not only determine what we study, but how we study it, the types of questions we ask, etc. While we do talk about application as a small group, I have found it to be more strategic to focus on action and effort in my one-on-one discipleship relationships. When I am meeting with a girl one-on-one every week, it is much easier to not only hear about her life, but to begin to notice patterns, and draw attention to those. Something else that we talk a lot about in our leadership team is not just talking to our students about taking action in their own lives, but inviting them into ours and modeling the behavior we are asking them to put into practice.
Mortar Board Chapter Action Plan (Fall 2014)
During my senior year I served as the Director of Community Service for the K-State Mortar Board chapter. At the beginning of the year, each of our three committees (service, leadership, and scholarship) worked to create a joint Chapter Action Plan identifying our goals for the year and our plans for engaging in and making progress in those areas. Before considering the unique goals of this year’s members, I identified several pre-existing or more external factors to consider. These included the stated ideals of Mortar Board (scholarship, leadership, service) and our chapter’s history of community service. What I had learned from the individual who help my position the previous year was that Mortar Board had engaged in community service at a local public housing apartment complex. Traditionally, Mortar Board members would host and provide a themed-dinner and interact with the apartment’s residents once a semester.
Knowing these preexisting factors gave me insight into my next phase of planning. Taking these known factors of what community service had looked like in the past, and Mortar Board’s three primary ideals, I met with the larger service committee to dream with them about how we might see these ideals play out and what meaningful service looked like to them. Something that came out in this meeting was a difference between volunteerism and service. As a group we desired to engage in a more relational, sustained, and strengths-based approach with whatever population we chose to serve.
Having determined a unified vision of the type of service our chapter wanted to engage in, my next question was whether or not we would be able to engage in that way at Apartment Tower, or if we would be free and better suited to serve in a different area or demographic. To learn more about the history of the relationship between Mortar Board and Apartment Towers as well as more about the complex itself and other opportunities for engagement within, I set up a meeting with the apartment’s housing manager.
The manager was very willing to meet with me and quick to tell me how much the residents had appreciated Mortar Board sponsored meals in the past. Instead of just focusing on technical elements of how this transaction occurred in the past, I chose to adopt an attitude of genuine curiosity and asked questions about the residents, what the day to day looks like in the apartment, if and how residents interacted together, what his role as manager looked like, what other staff roles existed, and areas of need and opportunity he saw. Through this, I learned that residents qualified by income to live in public housing, that this particular complex contained only single apartments and as a result most residents were elderly or disabled, that a lot of residents only got out about once a week to do grocery shopping, that there used to be a staff person responsible for resident life but that that position hadn’t existed for three or four years because of funding, and that very little interaction between residents occurred.
After this initial meeting, it was fun to consider how to pair the goals and resources of our chapter with the needs and opportunities for engagement at Apartment Tower. We began to consider how we could fill the gap of a missing resident life coordinator by planning regular activities for residents (and giving us an opportunity to have a more consistent presence, build relationships, and recognize and capitalize on the strengths of this community).
While I was excited about our potential for impact, the next step was to plan and ensure the feasibility of our commitment. The complex would probably benefit greatly from some type of weekly programming. However, based on the resources available (both financial and time) we decided to host a monthly event. The housing manager approved this plan and suggested that we plan our events on a set day of the week and set week of the month. During a chapter meeting I asked members what night of the week would generally work best for them. The consensus said Thursday, so I then created a Doodle Poll to see which week (first, second, third, or fourth) of the month and time frame would work best for most members. Using this data, we decided to schedule our monthly events for the second Thursday of every month from 5:30-7:00pm. In our initial planning stage, we left flexibility for the actual monthly programming, while setting the primary and enduring goals of our time together to be, namely, 1) to form relationships, 2) to promote lifelong learning, and 3) to promote leadership among residents.
tool for organizing the present on the basis of the projections of the desired future that is a road map to lead an organization from where it is now to where it would like to be in a finite period
of time