Community partner: Senator Jim Merritt, he is an Indiana state senator who is currently working on drug prevention, as he has labeled 2018 as "the year of prevention"
Challenge: Create an opioid prevention program for our peers at the high school.
Why I was attracted to the challenge: I personally wanted to do this challenge because of the connections I could make in the Indiana state government. I saw that the partner was Senator Jim Merritt and automatically wanted to try it out so that I could meet people involved in state government to further my connections with others later on.
Contribution: I personally was able to contribute by reaching out to Mr. Kegley about what we had going on and setting up a meeting. I was also the one to create the power point and calculate the logistics of time for our convocation to successfully fit everything we wanted into a limited time frame. Lastly I was present for every meeting but the initial with Senator Merritt and Mr. Kegley, and also was able to amek every lunch meeting with my group.
Takeaways:
Positive: From this experience I was able to expand my contacts, and had the opportunity to network with people I never would have had the chance to meet such as Jordan Rose, and Jim Merritt. Another positive takeaway I have from the experience is I was able to learn what all goes into behind the scenes work to put together a convocation.I believe this will be able to help me in the future as I want to go into education and having a basic understanding of different behind the scenes work with schools will help. Challenges: We constantly were challenged with getting to meet together, as we all have very different schedules. We were able to deal with this by putting aside time during lunch to meet with each other. Another challenge we faced, and for me personally the most difficult, was trying not to get bored with our project. I felt as though we were mostly just sticking with our original project and therefore the project dragged on, but we were able to fix this by throwing out crazy ideas to have fun with.
If you were to do it again what would you do it differently: If I did this project again I would not have spent so much time preparing for the final proposal. Instead I would take two weeks of my time to plan out and give the proposal and then I would start working on the project right away. Overall I would focus more on getting the resources needed for the convocation instead of trying to plan one from the side lines.