By: Tim Campbell, BA 2017
We are just beginning a new and exciting phase of the course. After weeks of deliberation and research – in addition to lots of emails and phone calls – each of our six teams has selected four organizations with which to move forward over the next several weeks. Given how difficult it was to select four organizations from the ten or so we had at the beginning of this process, it’s tough to reflect on some of the further decisions that will have to be made in the next few weeks. But the next stage of our course will help us determine how we should allocate our resources this semester.
Next week we will conduct our first site visits. These visits will provide us with an invaluable opportunity to see firsthand the important work these organizations are doing in Waco and the surrounding community. Although phone interviews and independent research have been useful methods for learning about these organizations thus far, we can only learn so much from conference calls. We’ll be able to learn so much more about the organizations and the people behind them when we visit them in person.
In particular, it will be useful to see with our own eyes the particular needs that every organization has. It’s one thing to hear an organization’s director talk about the need for a new hot water heater or convection oven, or about funding for internships or a new curriculum for adults looking to enter the workforce. But these needs will take on a whole new degree of urgency in our minds when we’re able to see what these organizations are doing on a day-to-day basis.
In class yesterday, Dr. Hogue instructed us to develop an agenda for each site visit. These agendas will consist of things we want to see and any lingering questions we have about the organization, its methods, or its effectiveness. They will also help to keep us on track during our visits, ensuring that we clear up any areas of confusion we still have.
But we don’t need to feel constrained by our agendas. As we talk with the leaders of these organizations, we may come up with new questions or become aware of needs that we did not previously know about. These developments, in turn, may lead to slight modifications in our grant proposals or different grant ideas than we had before.
So I’m excited to see how our site visits go during the next two weeks. We will prepare thoroughly so that we can make the most of our time when we visit these organizations, but we can (and should) be open to encountering things we may not have expected to find. We will learn lots of new things about our organizations and will be able to see their most pressing needs more clearly. And hopefully these discoveries will make our next difficult decision just a little bit easier.