Ben's Week April 9

This week was pretty productive. I got started on creating ideas for the portfolio. Like I said in last weeks post, it is good to just get things started. I think that I am going to have solid ideas to present to the Red Cross board when it's all finished. I should have the rough draft done in the next couple of days. The next step is setting up meetings with the president of the board and the staff to present what I am proposing. This next week should be extremely productive for me.

My biggest success would be getting the ball rolling on the proposal. I've been putting it off for awhile so it's good to see it getting started. My biggest challenge is definately being motivated. Seniortis is hitting really hard right now.

The leadership leason that I've learned this week would to be take the baby steps needed to get the ball rolling on projects.

My question for the week is: Is this nice weather making anyone not want to work on there projects?

Becky's Blog 8 (4/2-4/6)

This week I sent out an email to the women who attended the event, asking to meet with us over dinner so we could talk about what to do in the future. Two people showed up and we recruited another helper! I hope that we are able to carry this through to next year. I also met with Megan to talk about how to make this project sustainable. Some ideas were to still consider making this a student organization and to come up with different levels of commitment to the group. We probably will not do as big of an event next year unless more people volunteer to help. We will hopefully have lunch and invite guest speakers and even go to a women in ministry conference next April together.

One challenge this week was trying to get people involved. I send emails and it's hard to get people to respond.

One joy this week was actually getting someone who is willing to take care of all the paper work. It was also exciting to brainstorm ideas for next year. I just hope I have time to follow-up on some of them.

A Leadership lesson this week was that I realized I may not have communicated my vision very well to people. This may be why they are not responding to helping out. I did hear some comments about the event that were not positive, such as some people did not attend because they saw it as some feminist movement. Another lesson was to take help you can get. I was not sure if our new volunteer was adequate or committed to help us lead, but then as we were talking I realized that even if she is not the best leader, Jessica and I could help mentor and empower her and hopefully pass this off before we graduate.

Question: Do you have any ideas on what we can do in the future for this group?

Becky's Blog 7 (3/28-4/1)

This week I met with Dr. Cherry, Prof. Bernius, and Jessica to evaluate the event. It was a great time to reflect and see what went well and what could be improved. Reading the evaluations from the women who attended was a great help. I also emailed Mari Gonlag, the director of The Center for Women in Ministry thanking her and letting her know how the event went. Then I mailed the receipts to her so that we could be reimbursed.

One challenge this week was when I emailed Mari Gonlag. THe agreement in the beginning of this project was that we had $3,000 to spend before this school year is over. We spent about $2,200. So I asked her in the email if this same sort of thing will happen again next year. She said sorry but you can use the $800 that is left over. So now I'm a little annoyed because we could have saved so much more money so that we would have more for next year. So now we have to strategize on how to get money for next year.

One good thing was looking over the evaluations and seeing that we did meet the need and that the women want to do more in the future.

A Leadership lesson I learned was to debrief quickly and accurately. If we put off evaluating we will forget some things and it won't be an accurate evaluation. We must also be honest when evaluating so that we can do better next time.

Question: Do you have any ideas for raising money that does not involve too much fundraising?

Micah's Blog 7

Guess I was a little late on this blog... I have really made headway on my paper and am almost done. As for my project I have not done any work on it this week. I have worked a little on my presentation so I guess my victory is getting things done and my defeat is no headway on the actual project. My leadership lesson this week is that when things are done ahead of time better results of things like papers and presentations are happening. This is something that I have had to do but has really helped the quality of my work.

My question of the week is: Is anyone else seeing the quality of their work improve because they are forcing themselves to spend copious amounts of time on the project?

Aaron week April 5-11

This week was a stressful week for me because of my team project and all the things that needed to be fixed at the last minute. So I probably didn't get as much done as I would have liked. I did get some emails sent out to registrars and professors at other schools to get some more info on classes that they teach or groups that exist at those schools. I've gotten a few back already, which is encouraging.

I've decided that since I don't have a lot of concrete things to show for my project I'm going to try and write a kind of pretend syllabus for a senior seminar course. I might look into getting input from this year's freshmen about what worked well in world changer's and what could be done better/would be worth revisiting in the future. Then we can see how those topics could be incorporated into a senior seminar.

My biggest joy this week is actually getting done with the team project and not having to worry so much about that any more. The challenge has been not having a lot of time to work on anything else. The challenge for next week is going to be finding the time to do my paper and still make progress on the project itself.

Leadership lesson learned: be prepared to change everything

Question: odds of getting paper moved back?

Kendra April 5-11

Well this week we had our 3rd board meeting out of 4 for the semester, so that went pretty well! I am definitely learning new things every time we have a board meeting and I feel like I have gained a lot of personal experience through this part of our project (since that has been the biggest part). We FINALLY finished editing our bylaws this week and we have them in final form! But that was definitely a success for us, since we have been editing them and working on perfecting them all semester with the Board of Directors. (I’ll attach a picture so you all can see at least the first page) The rest of TJ and I’s week was mainly spent on working on our final paper; we didn’t have our weekly meeting with Dr. Millard because of having the board meeting but we will pick up with that next week so we can figure things out for our last board meeting on April 20. We worked on a lot of smaller parts of the paper and also we have started doing the literature review, what a long process! Well, hope everyone else’s papers are going well!

My greatest joy this week was definitely finishing and perfecting the bylaws to their final form.

My greatest challenge this week was probably getting started on the paper, it’s hard for me and TJ to find time to meet and discuss it, but once we got together I feel like we got a lot accomplished for the time we spent. Now the challenge will be finishing it before next Friday…

The leadership lesson I learned this week is not to procrastinate, I feel like if I would have stayed on top of this paper all semester and wrote it in pieces, it wouldn’t be such a daunting task, knowing that it’s due next Friday. I am usually someone who gets things done early, so it’s hard for me not to worry about it, but I will just have to work extra hard to get it done.

Question: How is everyone’s lit review coming along? Are you finding all the sources you need?

Ben's Week of April 2

So I wasn't sure if we were still suppose to post over Easter break. So just to be safe I'm going to go ahead and post one anyways. Sorry about the lateness of it. This past week was a pretty good week for my project. I gained direction in the area of doing my Lit review. I was pretty uncertain about this part of the paper so it was good to get a little better understand of what's going on. I started my paper, and tried to get the ball rolling on that project. I am still struggling with the proposal part of this project. My goal for this week is to have a good rough copy of the proposal itself.

My greatest joy was starting the paper process. I think the hardest part of any assignment is getting the ball rolling. So seeing that project start was a joy. The hardest part was the proposal, and not knowing what to do.

My lesson in leadership that I learned this week was that starting a project helps you gain momentum. I think that sometimes you need to just jump into projects as leaders to get them moving.

Since this post is late, I'm going to not post a question this week.