Class #8 Post

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.