Strategic Thinker
finds and develops unique opportunities to create value by enabling stimulating and creative dialogue among people who can affect an organization's direction
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. 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.
Learning Community Group Dynamics (Fall 2013)
My primary goal as a Class Leader for the School of Leadership Studies’ Introduction to Leadership class was to facilitate a twelve person learning community’s exploration of the question, “leadership for what?” through critical reflection, practice, and service learning. Increasingly throughout the semester, class leaders like myself, are asked to take a more hands off approach and to allow our students to practice exercising leadership among themselves. It is often difficult to find the balance of providing meaningful learning opportunities and knowing when to intervene. My first semester teaching the class I had one student who dominated the learning community. Her voice was heard most often in the group and the other students tended to default to her. At the beginning of the semester when I was more actively involved in the group, I tried to make sure everyone was heard by individually addressing other students and asking for their input. As the semester progressed and my learning community was beginning their service learning project, I became increasingly concerned that this one student was going to call of the shots and do most of the work and that the group would miss the learning experience of learning how to work as a team to achieve a common goal. After class one day, I asked this student if she could stay a minute to talk with me. I asked her about her perception of our learning community and how she thought everything was going. She expressed some frustration about the lack of involvement of other students. I seized this opportunity to have a conversation about authority and how people tend to look for protection, direction, and order. I shared my perception that the other students seemed to be defaulting to her and asked her to think about what would happen if she didn’t talk, or if she asked questions instead, specifically of her peers. By doing this I gave this student ownership and some basic skills to think about that would allow her to positively affect the direction of our group.
Second Year LIFE Group (Fall 2013)
My sophomore year, my friend and I co-led a LIFE group (bible study) for freshmen girls. In order to understand the gospel and grow more like Jesus in character, a lot of what we did in life group was centered on studying the bible. Understanding the gospel and growing in character like Jesus not only determined what we studied, but how we studied it, the types of questions we asked, etc. That year, knowing that our freshmen girls were hungry for relationships and had a desire to be known, we allowed more time for community building (playing games, eating snacks, sharing about our weeks). The next year, my junior year, my co-leader and I decided to stay with the same group of girls. As much as might have wished for things to stay exactly as they were, we knew that change was going to and had occurred and we wanted to create space and vision for growth. We knew that at this point, our girls were deeply invested and wanted to give them more ownership of the group, its value, and direction. We invited our girls into the process of casting vision for the year by asking two simple questions, “Where are you coming from?” and “Where are you going?” We spent one night first just reflecting on what we had seen God do in each other’s lives over the last year and how He had used this community to teach and grow each of us. Evaluation is such a critical component of strategic planning. It was important for us that we named where we had started and the gains we had already made as a group. Next, we talked about areas that we would like to grow in and developed a sort of catch phrase “real, rooted, relational” to capture the type of change we desired to see in our second year together.