After completing our mission, vision, and organizing our strategies, our class made Students for Students public. The three students who make up our communications team did a fantastic job creating our website and facebook page to promote ourselves and spread the word about our foundation. I believe it was difficult and an enormous amount of hard work for them to make such a great website and to continually update it. I don’t think they had too much experience with website building but they made it beautiful regardless! I am on the Board team with two other people and we provide additional support to the other teams. Our communications team has been doing so much yet they ask very little responsibility for us to take on. I am glad we’ve been able to interact and work together on outreach to make this a truly shared process.
To decide on which organizations to recruit, we brainstormed a list of nonprofits we had either personally served with or had heard about otherwise during our time in DC. Our class discussed if this created a sort of bias towards who was exposed to us and wondered if it was ethical that we started with our personal connections. Through our conversations we brought up that many foundations don't accept unsolicited proposals and only have closed RFPs. Since we have been promoting Students for Students online and through the community service center on campus (The Nashman Center), we kept our proposals open and are allowing any nonprofit to submit if they are interested. I personally believe that this tactic is beneficial to us because we are such a small "foundation" and likely won't be receiving many proposals, so reaching out to organization we know fit our mission seems logical and an effective use of our knowledge, connections, and resources.
In our Human Services and Social Justice program, both professors and students often discuss the potential impacts of both short- and long-term service. In our class of just fifteen students, we have a wide variety of service experiences related to length of involvement and program areas. We have maintained many relationships with organizations we have previously served with or had short term relationships with. For instance, I served with TASSC (Torture and Survivor Support Coalition) three semesters ago providing resume building advice to asylum seekers in the DMV area. My time there was incredibly beneficial and challenged me to address my personal assumptions about others, especially within interpersonal relationships. I was nervous before calling a translator to speak with a client and before I even met a client who I was told had a stoma. Once I was face to face with each person, I found that my biggest issue was the assumption about how hard it would be to bridge the language barrier between us rather than taking the time to question if the barrier existed in the first place.
I didn’t stay at TASSC long because it was far from campus and I had to find an internship for the following semester. I wondered if I was doing a disservice to the organization by leaving after only three months. Would I have had a better impact upon a client or the nonprofit itself by staying longer? Was I just replaceable? My classmates and I grapple with questions like these in every class, wondering if we are truly supporting the communities we serve or if we are serving ourselves more. However, even short-term relationships like these can be beneficial to organizations like TASSC by building a potential volunteer base within GW. I also reached out to them to apply for funding from Students for Students because all of their services fit exactly with our mission, so my informal relationship with them ended up benefiting us by getting an additional grant proposal and TASSC by offering potential funding.
My team and the communication team’s outreach seems to be successful so far! We have about fifteen nonprofits who have agreed to apply and we secured them through tactics we learned in classes like nonprofit management, community organizing, interpersonal relationships, and other projects we worked on with nonprofit partners. I personally feel very prepared for this foundation project in large part due to my past experiences within our program. I’m so excited to review the proposals we receive, build onto my knowledge around foundations, and measure the impact our funding can have!
-- Tanya
Responses from our class
Going back to your point about how we discussed if it was unethical, I definitely don't think it was unethical to reach out to the non-profits we already knew. I think it was resourceful to use our networks as a starting point, especially since, as you mentioned, we kept our application open to all non-profits.
Regarding your time at TASSC, I believe your time there was very valuable, and you shouldn't feel bad for having to leave. You did the most you could. Additionally, by reaching out to them now about Students for Students' grant, you're continuing to help them!
--Sajeda
I really appreciated your discussion of establishing relationships and the difference between short term and long term service. I too liked that one of our first recruitment strategies was to reach out to organizations where we already have relationships. We have such a unique opportunity in the GW HSSJ program to have worked with a wide variety of organizations over our 4 years, so it seems silly not to start with organizations where we have connections. Our recruitment strategy of identifying connections has also opened up discussions among our class about graduates of our program who are working in the various fields that we are looking into post graduation. Through these conversations, I have realized the reach of our program and how I can network with some of these alumnae to learn more about their experiences at GW and in actually applying their skills in the real world. I look forward to reaching out to recent graduates through our HSSJ LinkedIn page, and sharing with them the work we are doing as the Students for Students Foundation.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
--Elena