TJ Feb. 15th-19th

Tuesday after class, Kendra and I had our weekly meeting with Dr. Millard. We presented him the progress we had made over the past week. We talked a lot about the first board meetings and tried to nail down an agenda for the meeting. Tuesday evening, Kendra and I headed over to the Boys and Girls Club to try to track down Adam. We had no such luck. It seems very odd that Adam is very rarely at the Boys and Girls Club when the club is open for the kids. Not only was he not at the club, no one even knew where he was. Since Adam was planning on leaving the state on Wednesday, I asked Dwight to try to contact him on this cell phone. I ask Dwight to do this because he has worked with Adam several times and was comfortable calling his cell phone. Wednesday, after my class, I went up to talk to Dr. Starcher and ask him if the date we had planned for the first board meeting would work for him. Unfortunately he had a standing business division meeting scheduled at the same time. Thursday, I talked to Dr. Millard and informed him that we could not get a hold of Adam and Dr. Starcher could not make the scheduled time for the board meeting so we decided to push back the first board meeting until after spring break.

The greatest challenge this week was definitely working out schedules for the first board meeting. Kendra did the majority of the work sitting down with Kelly to work through the Center staffs’ schedules but it was still very frustrating trying to track down Adam and having to go to Dr. Starcher’s office twice to get a hold of him.

My greatest joy this week was getting ready for the final preparations for the board meeting. After our meeting with Dr. Millard on Tuesday I was so excited for the board meeting and it really re energized my spirits for this project. Although the board meeting was pushed back I am still very excited about it and ready to present to the board!

On lesson I learned this week was that you can’t let little things get you down. It would have been pretty easy to get depressed about not being able to get a hold of Adam or especially the board meeting being pushed back but you just have to stay focused on the goal. We shouldn’t focus on the setbacks but stay excited about the goal.

Question: Has anyone else been experiencing major setbacks likes the ones Kendra and I have this week?

Ben's Blog 2

This week I focused on some minor "house keeping" task. I created a excel sheet for my time log. This was very helpful to see how many hours I have banked so far, and to also to track my progress. I also had previously printed out a lot of articles to be read. I finished up reading those articles. Two of them very pretty long and a bit dry, and the other two were shorter in nature. I found some very valuable content in these articles that I think will be helpful to the overall project. I have researched and read quite a few articles now. I plan this weekend to go through those article notes and try to make sense of it all. I feel like I have a lot of loose ends that need to be tied back together.

My greatest joy was getting through all the articles I have researched this far. It was nice to see that I had read that many, and also taken detailed notes. The greatest challenge would be getting through some of the articles. One of the longer articles I read got pretty dry at times, and was very hard to focus on. It feels good at the same time seeing a small step being completed.

This week I learned that is about keeping on when you don't feel like it. It's about taking baby steps to get what you want accomplished. I have been doing better with time management, and this has helped me to be more productive.

For my question of the week I was wondering what has been the best way for research? Do you gain the most out of articles, interviews, or surveys?

Aaron's blog 2

This week I attended a couple sessions of world changers to try and get a feel for the direction they're moving in. Content wise, I didn't see a lot of difference in the lecture portion. For some reason though, it seemed to be more interesting to me than it was freshman year. I'm not sure if that's because I actually find it interesting now or if it's a difference in the way it's being taught. The wednesday portion of world changers is now being held in college church in the great room. It's a little more discussion based than it has been in the past. Following the class on wednesday, I sent Dr. Garner an email with my thoughts on how the class was. I suggested to him that he look into making the discussion part longer, possibly a two hour block, because you just can't get really deep into the issues in the short amount of time that there was. I have not heard anything back from him yet.

Last week, I mentioned that I had talked to Dr. Smith and he had forwarded an email on to the general education committee for me. I still haven't heard anything back from them either so I sent him another email today asking if he had. I'm waiting on that one too.

I have started researching what some other colleges require for religion or theology classes and found that several have something such as a basic christian beliefs or doctrine class or a christian thought class that they require. I may contact some of these other schools and ask more about those classes. I also intend to take a look at what IWU currently requires for all gen eds. and see if maybe there's something that really doesn't need to be in there that could be taken out to add another bible or theology course. That will probably be something to talk to the gen. ed. committee about.

My biggest joy this week was being able to sit in and talk to people about world changers, and to see how it's running. It really looks like they're moving in a good direction with the discussion groups. My biggest challenge has once again been finding things to do. I'm hoping that the gen. ed. committee will get back to me soon because one of things I asked them is to let me know what I can do to help in the process.

The leadership lesson for this week similar to last week's. When you don't have anything else to do, do what you think you might need to do in the future. It's hard for me to know what to do without having a response to my email from the gen. ed. committee. One of the things I thought I might need to do is look into what other schools require and what it might be possible for us to add. So that's what I started to do this week.

My question for this week is "do any of you have any recommendations or someone I should talk to or something I should look into?"

Becky's Blog 2 (2/13-2/19)

This week I did not spend a lot of time on my project due to demands from other classes. Although I did spend some time working on the budget with Jessica and trying to figure out how we are going to have four speakers. We were adding up the cost for our four speakers and were a bit frustrated to see we did not have enough left for books, food, and advertising. We decided that instead of getting everyone a book we would cut it down to only giving the first 25 or so to register a book, and then have them as prizes for drawings too. I am bummed about this but it will all work out.

We did later receive bad news, yet good news in disguise. One of our speakers, Kylee Larson cannot make it to our event now. I really liked talking to her and felt she had a lot to share with us, but if it helps us organize our event and open up our budget more then I guess it's okay. I did write her back and asked if maybe she'd like to write a short letter to us with anything she would like us to know about ministry. I would then email it out as part of our advertising possibly. It would give them a little taste of what will be happening at the event.

I am still waiting on our advertising graphic design but we did get to pick out a logo for our group which we named WoMin (women in ministry). This really made me more excited about forming this group, just knowing we have a name and a logo. You can see a picture of it up top. Hopefully we can start advertising this next week.

One struggle in leadership this week was letting Jessica do the tasks I delegated to her. I just want to get things done, but she is busy as well and has put it off a bit. I am learning to keep others accountable though. But it is still hard because I also need the hours, so when I could be adding hours working on her stuff its hard to sit and wait. But I have restrained and am trusting that I will get the amount of hours I need.

Questions: What do you think of our logo? Do you have any other ideas as to how to include the books? Do you have any suggestions on how to keep delegating but still getting my hours?

February 15th-February 19th

On Monday this week, I had a meeting with Kelly (Dr. Millard’s Secretary), in order to find out the best way to coordinate schedule for our first board meeting. Most of our board members are in the leadership department but Adam (from Boys & Girls club) and Dr. Starcher (Business Division). We had picked Thurs. Feb. 25 (11am-12pm) for our first board meeting date and had everyone scheduled except Adam and Dr. Starcher. Kelly helped us a lot by giving us tips on the easiest way to contact people and coordinate schedules. On Monday evening, I spent about an hour and a half writing up the bylaws of the Leadership Consulting Firm, which was not an easy task, and these will be presented at our first board meeting to our board members for tips and approval. On Tuesday, we had our weekly meeting with Dr. Millard and we presented our bylaws to him and he helped us correct & revise them a little bit with his further knowledge of organizational bylaws. We also went over the things that we will need to include in the first board meeting and spent time talking about our to-do list for our board meeting. Then, on Tuesday evening, TJ and I went to the boys and girls club to talk to Adam about having the meeting on Feb. 25 to make sure that it worked with his schedule. Well he wasn’t there and none of his employees knew where he was at, so we had no luck finding him. Another guy who is helping with our project then called him and he said that date was not going to work for him. Then, TJ talked to Dr. Starcher on Wed. afternoon and he also said that date and time did not work for him to be able to make the meeting. This was disappointing because we really wanted these two people at the meeting, they both have an area of expertise that we did not want to lack in our first meeting. So now our meeting is going to have to be pushed back to the week after Spring Break.

The greatest challenge this week was trying to coordinate everyone’s different schedules to have one time open-at the same time as all the other group members. We did anticipate this being a challenge when we started but not something that we thought would push back the progress of our project. I think that being flexible is a good thing but at the same time, it’s kind of frustrating when you make a lot of plans and then they get pushed back.

My greatest joy this week would have to be putting together the bylaws and then having Dr. Millard be very impressed with our progress on this step of our project process. Since this is something that we both has neither done before, it was nice to know that we had Dr. Millard’s (someone who has experience in this area) approval!

One particular leadership lesson I learned was that sometimes everything doesn’t go exactly the way you pictured it and you have to be flexible and sometimes even re-align your goals and time frame for things. I know that it didn’t ruin our project or anything, so it was just something we had to adjust to.

Question: Does anyone have experiences with board formation or board meetings that they could offer us any advice as we are in the process of planning?

Micah's Blog 2

This week has been very productive for me. I met with Brandon Hill and we had a great talk about where the project is going. He informed me that the class would have to wait until fall training of 2011 because of class approvals and deciding with others about how the class should go. This sounds like bad news but it is good. He went on to say that if we are going to do the class right it should take that long in order to make it happen. He is very excited to meet with others and talk about the project.
My next task is to get together with Stephanie Santarosa, Ezra Johnson, Megan Gilmore, and Dan Poff. In these four meetings I will inform them and get information from them to prepare for my big meeting with these four faculty as well as Brandon Hill and Bill Millard. I e-mailed Bill about getting some materials to better prepare for my talks with these four and he is sending me back some good sources soon. Everything seems to be coming together and this week has been very encouraging for me.

My question of the week is: Does anyone else have prior experience in writing a sylabus or class plan? I need whatever help I can get.

Becky's Blog 1 (2/7-2/12)

This week was so crazy I forgot to post my blog on time! Sorry everybody. At the beginning of this week I wasn't too sure what I needed to do to continue my project. We were basically waiting for speakers to respond and forgot about other details such as advertising and working with the budget. I found this out when I met with Cherry and Bernius. I felt a little naive that I didn't think about these things. But, we were able to sit down and write out a strategy to carry out. It was a little overwhelming at first but once I accomplished a few of our goals I felt better.

The first goal I met was securing our speakers. I never thought to tell them that we would be paying them to come and was wondering why it was taking them so long to respond. So once I sent out another email with all the details I got yeses from them all. Our speakers are going to be Kelli Ward, Carla Sunberg, Kathy Resler, and Kylee Larson. We were originally going to only have three so now we have to figure out how we are going to fit four or if we are going to only keep three. I am not sure if we can afford four either, so that is something we will have to discuss this next week.

A second goal I met was getting someone to do the graphic design for our advertising. I was directed to The Firm, a small room up in Student Development where Art majors, mostly graphic design majors, create designs for free as part of their classes. We will hopefully have a proof by this next friday, which we need soon so we have time to print and advertise!

So my greatest challenges were staying organized, thinking about details, and getting advertising going (I pretty much ran around like a chicken with my head cut off until I got somewhere). My greatest joy was securing the speakers and getting the advertising going. I am excited about this event.

Leadership lessons would have to be making sure I don't lose sight of the vision, and making sure I keep taking steps to actually meet our ultimate goal. I am glad that I have Cherry and Bernius and Jessica to keep me accountable. It is really hard to make sure I am doing all I can by myself. I hope I can break this by the end of my project.

I will end with this question: Do you think it would be more efficient to have three or four speakers? Based on your answer, what would we have to do differently to accommodate that many speakers? (We have from 12pm-5pm and want to eat lunch and have a panel discussion)