As October makes way for winter, the McDonough Center for Leadership and Business stays busy, continuing its pursuit of productivity and student development. In the several sections of the Center’s Foundations of Leadership course, Leadership Cohort 39 finds themselves in the midst of their first large-scale service projects — volunteering time to serve their community during National Make a Difference Day.
Each cohort of Leadership students takes part in the annual day of service, traditionally celebrated on the fourth Saturday of October. Beginning in 1992 as a collaboration between USA Weekend magazine and the nonprofit organization Points of Light to emphasize community service, National Make a Difference Day became a widespread effort, with communities across the United States joining hands to improve the lives of their fellow townspeople. The McDonough Center began its participation in the event in 2006, turning the day of service into a teaching opportunity for all Leadership students at Marietta College.
Each year’s service projects are chosen from applications submitted on GivePulse, a platform used to manage community involvement projects and volunteer hours. Those chosen are typically within a thirty-minute drive from the college campus, with enough work for eight to 24 students to volunteer for three hours. The projects must also have an achievable scope for the students to make significant progress within their volunteering window and take place on or around the day of Make a Difference Day.
Representing 11 different organizations, 10 of which are local to the Mid-Ohio Valley, Cohort 39’s members were split into groups of four to six students and assigned a project based on their interests. These projects, ranging from the O’Neill Day Center’s Halloween party to a county-wide smoke alarm installation event sponsored by the Red Cross, all require communication, planning, and diligence, culminating in both the day of service and a presentation summarizing the process and impacts of the students’ efforts.
“It’s a bit of a heavy lift for the first semester, but it’s meant to be,” said Dr. Amy Elliott, Interim Dean and Professor of Leadership at the McDonough Center. “It’s a stretch goal.”
To tie into the McDonough Center’s curriculum, Make a Difference Day cultivates the leader-follower relationship detailed in the Five Components Model. The model, created by former professors Dr. Robert M. McManus and Dr. Gamaliel Perruci, is a way of conceptualizing leadership dynamics while also considering the context and cultural norms of a situation. Each group member plays the role of both leader and follower throughout the project with specific tasks they are responsible for completing — for instance, one member’s task is to handle all communication with the organization. In addition, the groups list and carry out the steps toward their common goal, another component named in McManus and Perucci’s model.
The nature of the work requires significant independence from the groups. Much of the project is done outside the classroom, but two to three in-class days are also built into the course schedule to accommodate the involved students’ often-busy schedules. The first in-class day is dedicated to contacting their partner organizations, while the second and third days are usually for final preparations or presentation work. Leadership Center faculty provide assistance when necessary, but the responsibility to complete the projects lies in the students.
“Make a Difference Day is based around being able to negotiate group work, and to be able to examine and reflect upon the leadership that happened in that group — both their own leadership and how the group worked together,” said Dr. Elliott. “It also builds professional communication skills because they have to work directly with community members… and presentation skills, because of their presentations after the fact.”
This year’s Make a Difference Day was observed on Saturday, Oct. 25, with certain projects occurring before or after the date due to schedule constraints. The students’ presentations will occur during class in mid-November to allow time for them to finalize their reflections on the process, both individually and as a group.
Although the process of Make a Difference Day has been streamlined over nearly two decades of operation, Dr. Elliott still welcomes feedback from former participants to make the event run even more smoothly — demonstrating the McDonough Center’s goal to constantly grow alongside its students.
“We’d love to hear from students or alums who are past it, and can say, ‘You know what? Make a Difference Day really was good,’ or ‘Here’s what I would change now having looked back on it,’” said Dr. Elliot.