This week was a bit of a whirlwind for our class, as we had our last class session cancelled
due to a storm in Lowell which caused a lot of power outages on campus. We had to discuss two
week’s worth of reading material/assignments as well as play catch-up with our mock nonprofits
and service learning project.
As an icebreaker to get everyone engaged and to get conversation flowing, we went around
the room identifying performance indicators and performance goals relevant to our own life. This
was related to our management dashboards and logic models that we were tasked with creating for
our nonprofits. Professor Lippe started us off with her example: her goal being to get as much
exercise as possible and her indicator being miles spent biking or running per week. There were a
huge variety of goals (though ones related to academics were popular). It was interesting to hear
what each classmate values/finds important in his/her life and the exercise additionally got us
thinking critically about how to implement and formulate successful performance goals and
indicators.
We then moved onto to discussing our logical
models and management dashboards. Professor Lippe pulled up Tyler’s work as
examples and we talked about them as a class.
We then moved on to talking about Peter
Drucker’s book, The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About
Your Organization, which we had to read for class two weeks ago. For our
discussion question, Professor Lippe asked us which Drucker question we thought
was the most difficult to implement. We voted by show of hands and there were
votes for every question. Each “team” then got a chance to defend why they
thought a specific question was the most difficult to implement. I think we
came away from the discussion realizing that all five questions are very
important in the world of nonprofit development and management, perhaps with
all five even being equally as significant.
We then divided up into our mock nonprofit
groups to share our mission statements with each other. There is a group who
envisions working with foster kids, trying to provide services to close the gap
between foster care and real life (no abrupt aging out/getting dropped from the
system at 18). There is another group who theoretically wants to provide
service dogs to military veterans. Still another group imagines working to
engaging children with environmental issues through innovative technology. The
last group hypothetically wants to provide tutoring to ELL students in public
schools, with the short-term goal of helping them succeed on standardized
testing. We all critiqued each other’s mission statements and then discussed
how these statements were the guiding factor in everything else we were to
develop as part of these mock organizations. Our goals, theory of change etc.
all had to align under our different mission statements. We then had a brief
discussion about the purpose of creating our own mock nonprofits, concluding
that the experience would better allow us to judge the grant applications that
we will be receiving shortly. We continued to work in our mock nonprofit groups
for a while, collaborating about our management dashboards and finalizing our
logic models to submit to Professor Lippe.
The last part of class we spent discussing our
service project. Last class, Vanessa was put in charge of reaching out to the
Boys & Girls Club of Greater Lowell. She presented what she and one of the
directors had discussed about our project, stating that there were two options
for our class to choose from: working directly with the children in some
capacity or working on the weekend to help set up a makerspace for the
children. As a class, we decided that we’d rather work with the kids. As we all
have vastly different interests and areas of expertise, we decided to combine a
bunch of different program ideas into one as a kind of station playday. We
envisioned setting up multiple different stations (each focused on a different
area) for the kids that they would travel around to. We loosely defined the
purpose at this point as trying to expose the participants to different
hobbies/subjects (we left the exact wording up to group crafting the mission
statement). We then divided into groups, one to work on the mission statement
and outcome measurements for the project, one to plan the logistics and one to
create the individual stations and activities.
This week was a bit of a whirlwind for our
class, as we had our last class session cancelled due to a storm in Lowell
which caused a lot of power outages on campus. We had to discuss two week’s
worth of reading material/assignments as well as play catch-up with our mock
nonprofits and service learning project.
As an icebreaker to get everyone engaged and to
get conversation flowing, we went around the room identifying performance
indicators and performance goals relevant to our own life. This was related to
our management dashboards and logic models that we were tasked with creating
for our nonprofits. Professor Lippe started us off with her example: her goal
being to get as much exercise as possible and her indicator being miles spent
biking or running per week. There were a huge variety of goals (though ones related
to academics were popular). It was interesting to hear what each classmate
values/finds important in his/her life and the exercise additionally got us
thinking critically about how to implement and formulate successful performance
goals and indicators.
We then moved onto to discussing our logical
models and management dashboards. Professor Lippe pulled up Tyler’s work as
examples and we talked about them as a class.
We then moved on to talking about Peter
Drucker’s book, The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About
Your Organization, which we had to read for class two weeks ago. For our
discussion question, Professor Lippe asked us which Drucker question we thought
was the most difficult to implement. We voted by show of hands and there were
votes for every question. Each “team” then got a chance to defend why they
thought a specific question was the most difficult to implement. I think we
came away from the discussion realizing that all five questions are very
important in the world of nonprofit development and management, perhaps with
all five even being equally as significant.
We then divided up into our mock nonprofit
groups to share our mission statements with each other. There is a group who
envisions working with foster kids, trying to provide services to close the gap
between foster care and real life (no abrupt aging out/getting dropped from the
system at 18). There is another group who theoretically wants to provide
service dogs to military veterans. Still another group imagines working to
engaging children with environmental issues through innovative technology. The
last group hypothetically wants to provide tutoring to ELL students in public
schools, with the short-term goal of helping them succeed on standardized
testing. We all critiqued each other’s mission statements and then discussed
how these statements were the guiding factor in everything else we were to
develop as part of these mock organizations. Our goals, theory of change etc.
all had to align under our different mission statements. We then had a brief
discussion about the purpose of creating our own mock nonprofits, concluding
that the experience would better allow us to judge the grant applications that
we will be receiving shortly. We continued to work in our mock nonprofit groups
for a while, collaborating about our management dashboards and finalizing our
logic models to submit to Professor Lippe.
