Following last week’s class activities,  I had a clearer idea of what needed to be done within the group. Things, like roles and procedures, that we had already settled on were revealed to need more consideration.

I think the most enlightening exercise was the one that required us to list the official roles that we have in our group. As the class began to offer their ideas on what was required of each position, one thing became very clear to me. We needed to make some minor adjustments to the way we communicate.

Right now, our communication system involves mostly email and GroupMe. It was only after we began to discuss how each committee, or the executive head of each committee, conferred with the rest of the cohort that I realized our slight hiccup. Everyone seemed to be under the assumption that each executive head was going to emailing their information to the rest of the cohort.

In general, there is nothing wrong with that setup, but we have a communications committee (which I’m om). What is the point of the communications committee if not to regulate and manage the  flow of communication. I feel that outside of our monthly assembly meetings, exec. heads should not be emailing cohort members that are not apart of their committee. Any information that the cohort receives should go through my committee. Exec heads could send someone an email to someone within my committee who could then tailor that message and send it to everyone. This would also apply to the meeting head. It would be more effective if the person who mediates the meetings sends the agenda to my committee who would then handle sending it to the cohort.

I think this would be more effective because then emails would not be coming from everyone, and it would also give other committee members something to do. Right now, there are maybe five people on the communications committee. Brianna heads the meetings, Janavi keeps the minutes, and Daniel handles our Google Docs and emails. If we centralize the email chain, then Daniel could share the roles with another person to not put so much pressure on himself and share the workload.

The system that we have in place right now is working, and it is working fine; I just feel that we could make it work a little smoothly. Our organization does not have an email domain that lets us know “Hey, this message if coming from the LEAD Group.” Instead we get messages from every other member and at some point, usually in the actual email we are told that it deals with LEAD stuff.

I made the suggestion. We’ll see if it gets picked up.

Anyway, I think that was the most important thing that I took from our exercises. I don’t feel hopeless or frustrated or anything like that because what we have works; I just saw a way to make it work  a bit better.