Positive Change... In One Hour

The activity for this week's blog post was pretty enjoyable.  The entire class had one hour to make a positive change on campus.  For this task, I paired up with Karthik.  We decided that we wanted to make a poster with positive messages, and these positive messages would be written by other college students.  Here is the end result....

I guess I should give some background information on how we decided to go with a student inspired poster of positivity.  Here we go...

Upon hearing that our assignment was to make a positive change on campus in the next hour, Karthik instantly thought of going to the Ohio Union (There's a diverse group of people there, and they're usually pretty willing to help out their fellow buckeyes).  So, on our 15-20 minute trek from North Campus to the Union (which I'm not mad about because I don't particularly care for the CABS system), Karthik was just spewing idea after idea of how to make positive change.  These ideas ranged from making posters with positive phrases on them and hanging them up around campus, to donating blood at the local blood drive on campus.  The blood drive was a pretty good idea, except that I hadn't eaten much that day and it had already closed by the time our assignment was given to us.  So, while the poster idea was still in the running, we kept thinking as we made our way to the resource room at the Union.

Shortly after arriving in the resource room was when I had my one and only idea about what we should do.  Going off of Karthik's poster idea, I said "why don't we have students write positive messages on the poster instead of us" (or something along those lines).  Luckily, that was the only idea I had to come up with because we ran with it and thus began our journey of making positive change.

After buying a $.75 poster board and using Karthik's BuckID as collateral for some scented makers, we ran into a few of Karthik's friends who started off our poster of positivity.  (Seen below)

After that, we moved onwards and asked a student who clearly needed a break from studying if she had any positive messages she wanted to share. (Again, seen below)

Moving on from her, we found a group of students visiting from Oberlin College who shared some messages with us.  (I'm not sure if this showed them how positively awesome OSU is, or how positively wacky some of it's students are... Either way, pictured below)

After the Oberlin Students, Karthik and I turned to a few students sitting at the 35th Annual African American Heritage Festival information table.  However, one stipulation for them signing our poster was that we had to pass out flyers and spread the word about the Heritage Festival....

After the African American Heritage Festival table, we moved on into the Multicultural Center for some positive advice.  (All the while handing our the flyers to anyone who signed our poster)

At this point, I think you get the gist of how the Positivity Poster was created.  There are probably more  photos on other blogs as we were all helping each other's groups out with their projects at this point.

Finally, as our hour came to an end, we took a CABS bus back to North Campus where we (as a group) made our last positive change by singing Carmen Ohio.  (Again, this video is most likely available on other blogs)

And that's the story of the how we made positive change on campus in one hour....

AGS Sacred Bulls...

I don't know if I had more trouble finding examples of "Sacred Bulls" within my organization, or if I had more trouble finding examples that I wanted to admit to...


Anyways, here we go...

1)  During my organization's election period, people ran for positions because they were "easy" and because you "didn't have to do much".

This was a very common theme/idea when I first joined my fraternity.  I don't know who started or accepted this idea, but I was not a big fan of it.  The way that I went about solving this was basically to tell everyone before they were elected that they would be expected to perform what their office required.  I think this deterred the people who wanted the position because it would look good on a resume and really allowed other people to step up, fill the positions, and shine.

2) People "look the other way" when people don't adhere to rules and values of our Organization.

At first, the issues that were violated when minor, but I think that's led to more and more issues being overlooked.  This may have an effect on the first issue I mentioned. While this was happening, the quality of men that were allowed in our fraternity steadily declined.  Now, we're having to do a lot more work to attract the quality of men we really want.


I know this is a really short blog, but these are really the two major "Sacred Bulls" that I've noticed and worked to fix within my organization.







How can you reframe these sacred bulls in ways that will positively affect your membership or leadership in an organization? What can you try, who will need to be on board, and how do you begin the change process related to those things that are so ingrained in your group’s culture?