You have been selected as Greenhouse Scholars because of your leadership, community impact, relentlessness, and accountability. Each of you have impacted not just your own lives, but many others in your families and communities. Your passion for service makes each of you catalysts for change. The Community Impact Initiative will help develop the critical skills and experience needed to be an effective and successful employee, community leader, and change agent over your lifetime.

The Community Impact Initiative is a unique opportunity to harness and develop the collective skills, knowledge, and passions of your class and our community to serve others. The Community Impact Initiative is an entrepreneurial endeavor in which each class of Scholars leads a four-year project to positively impact a middle or high school in a low-income community.

This website should facilitate your efforts, however, it is not a “how to.” As is with every entrepreneurial endeavor, it will require you and your class to be intrepid, employ critical thinking, identify creative solutions, take calculated risks, learn from your failures, step outside your comfort zone, elicit outside guidance, and much more. The challenge is real, and the rewards are great. This is an opportunity to have a major impact!

We selected you to be a part of our community because we believe you want to have an impact and grow as a leader. This four year initiative is the most tangible and direct impact in scale and size that many of you will have been a part of. This is a significant learning opportunity and will be challenging. We would not ask a group of random people to complete this big, entrepreneurial, and long-term project, as we would not expect them to succeed. We believe that each Scholar class holds the potential to accomplish unique, lasting, and effective initiatives during their time in the Greenhouse Scholars program.

In year one, you will identify a need, problem, or opportunity existing at a low-income school and brainstorm ways that your team can meet this need, solve this problem, or seize this opportunity. During this time, you will figure out the Big Picture goal for your project, determine whether the project is feasible, and identify the major deliverables. You will focus on setting goals and developing a roadmap that everyone will follow. During this phase, the scope of the project is defined, a project management plan is developed, and roles and responsibilities are clearly defined so everyone involved knows what they are accountable for. Use this year to form relationships with each other, school officials, community members, and other organizations/businesses who are stakeholders in the problem you are trying to solve. This is a great time to familiarize yourself with the Skills Modules, which offer a wealth of knowledge, advice, and steps for many of the tasks you will be undertaking this year.

This is the phase where deliverables are developed and completed, and the initiative is being launched within your identified school's community. This often feels like the meat of the project since a lot is happening during this time, like status reports and meetings, development updates, and performance reports. A “kick-off” meeting usually marks the start of the Project Execution phase where the teams involved are informed of their responsibilities and timelines. During Year 2, you will begin to solicit and receive feedback about the effectiveness of your initiative and you will begin to incorporate that feedback into your project. This is a great year to connect with experts in our community through the Professional Networking Directory to receive guidance and advise from subject area experts!

In this phase, you will establish baselines, performance measures, and other methods of measuring and evaluating your community impact initiative. You will measure project progression and performance to ensure that everything happening aligns with your project management plan and overall mission. You will use key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine if the project is on track, and you will consistently be in contact with community members for their feedback and advice in moving your initiative towards World Class status.

Once your team has completed work on a project, you enter the closure phase. In the closure phase, you provide final deliverables, release project resources, and determine the success of the project. You will present on the final outcomes of your community impact initiative. This should be an honest assessment of your initiative, next steps, and final lessons learned. Staff and community members will offer feedback to be incorporated into the class’s Final Report and celebrate the class on 3.5 years of entrepreneurial problem-solving! You have now completed more years of real-life community development work than any of your college peers! At some point during this semester, leadership team coordinates a day to present final report to whole class, staff advisor, community advisor, school leadership, and applicable community members.