My role in this project has taken many forms. I have been a public speaker, promoting our non-profit client, recruiting walkers for the Help the Homeless Walkathon, and soliciting donations. I have been charged with keeping our nine-person team organized, on the ball, and together as one driving force in accomplishing a large task. Our goals were numerous: promote awareness of the homelessness epidemic in the District of Columbia, solicit walkers from the American University campus and community to walk in the Walkathon, and in turn support the initiatives of our non-profit client, Hope and A Home.
I have written a memorandum every three weeks keeping our client updated of our progress as a team, and more specifically with my own personal progress in the role of Project Manager. Mike and Ann of Hope and A Home were fantastic directors to work with, making their organization a wonderful client with which to interact. Our team was a diverse collection of individuals, most of whom I truly enjoyed working with. I enjoyed the most working with a few truly motivated teammates who proved their reliability, punctuality, knowledge, creativity, intuitiveness, and work ethic. As with most teams, I experienced a few bad apples. Overall, however, I feel that our team’s heart was in the right place and everyone seemed to care about our overall set of goals, even if they didn’t care about their own personal goals as much.
I was very happy to be able to embark on this philanthropic endeavor for several reasons. One of these reasons was my privilege to work with the many gifted persons at Hope and A Home, and within my own team. I was able to receive a lot of support from a few key individuals, all of whose help I praised and whose enthusiasm I nurtured and encouraged. Secondly, I was able to help a good cause. While I was just one person, I was organizing the collective force of nine, and in turn my impact on the lives on many people has been finite. I know for a fact that the job that I have performed has impacted the lives of many people. Our team worked to raise over $500 for Hope and A Home. While I don’t know specifically what these five-hundred dollars will be used for, I can offer a few examples: feeding several hundred hungry, homeless people at a food shelter; or substantially reducing the rent burden on Hope and A Home for a month at one of their properties. Next, working on this project, and playing such big role, has left me with a sweet sense of satisfaction. Now that my position is expired in the sense that my job is complete, I am able to stand back and look at everything that I’ve accomplished, and be wowed.
I made a detailed day-by-day schedule of what our team needed to accomplish, detailing specifically who was responsible for what. I also e-mailed the entire team several times weekly reminding them of upcoming due dates, project facets needing closure, and of other related tasks. My position consisted mostly of organizing team members in an efficient way and coordinating tasks to ensure that everything came together in one synergy. During this process I have been able to identify many of my strengths. I have found that do well at facilitating meetings with group members. I also do a good job of keeping group tasks organized, and keeping hard working team members engaged in the project at hand. I am a fantastic public speaker and presentation coordinator/synthesizer, and as such our client was impressed with my presentation abilities and the organization of our team presentation that I prepared.
One particular weakness of mine surfaced, and it’s an issue which I plan to address sooner in future management positions: identifying sooner those team members whom aren’t pulling their weight, and bring the issue of group accountability to their attention sooner. I think that during this project I was too soft on those members of our team that contributed significantly less than others. I suppose a limiting factor to my ability to control wasteful resources being spent on useless team members was the fact that I have no power over their salary of employment status. This project has been part of a University course, and as such, the only motivation that flailing team members have had to do even the small bit they did was their desire not to receive a failing grade. I could not, in this case, simply “fire” a student for underperforming (or in some cases, not performing at all).
In general I have historically been somewhat ignorant of issues concerning the homelessness epidemic in the United States. This project was a great opportunity for me to acquaint myself with some of DC’s, and the United States’, issues relating to poverty. I am a better versed person now, and I more fully understand the causes and cures related to issues in poverty. A large reality that has dawned upon me is that most homeless persons are not the ones that we see. They are not bums holding up ridiculous signs just to make a buck. So many homeless persons are homeless because they are out of work, or they simply cannot afford formal housing arrangements. It is not always the fault of the homeless, why they are on the streets.
I feel that our philanthropic event planning was definitely successful. Our team set an optimistic goal of recruiting 150 walkers. Three huge factors worked against our campaign: the AIDS walk; Thanksgiving weekend; and our audience, college students, whom wish not to wake as early as the Walkathon required. In light of these factors, we recruited only about 50 walkers. Our campaign consisted of all the elements of a successful campaign; however our walker goal never came to fruition because of the above stated reasons. Our more important goal of informing our audience of the issue of homelessness in DC was accomplished, however. A thousand people received our outreach messages teaching them about the Help the Homeless Walkathon and about the issue of homelessness in general. We also widely distributed the name of our client, who is trying to expand its contact base. I believe our team did a more than sufficient job of accomplishing the goals that we set forth, and because of such I consider our project to have been a big success.
I have developed qualities within myself as a result of being Project Manager for this endeavor. I’ve become better at distributing work among team members and engaging the most prominent talents in those team members. I’ve gotten better at writing professional memorandums, and at public speaking. I feel that my persuasive public speaking abilities have improved, and my ability to engage an audience in the material that I am presenting has been enhanced. In future Washington Initiative projects of this nature, I would recommend that the outreach undertakings of the group be distributed and engaged much sooner than our group did. I felt that our entire project timeline was very rushed, and while this did enhance my ability to handful high-stress situations successfully, I feel that much of the stress could have been avoided, had our group begun planning earlier. Overall, the experience has been enjoyable and quite educational. I would gladly engage in endeavors of this kind at my places of employment in the future, having taken away the leadership and planning skills from this project that I have.
No comments:
Post a Comment