Year 4—Symposium | Closing Remarks

This is it. This is your last Summer Symposium and your last chance to share with us the lasting mark that you and your peers have left on the world. You’ve now successfully spent 3 years learning, creating, ideating, and digging into a societal issue within a real-world context. You have shown true entrepreneurialism by creating your own solution to a problem and seeing it through until the end.

During this Summer Symposium, give a presentation which encapsulates this experience. Think about what you’ve learned through this process, what surprised you, and what you’re taking with you. Focus on your successes, failures, and what they mean. Tell us about the status of your initiative and its future legacy in the world. Be proud of what you’ve accomplished and allow us to celebrate all your hard work.

• New Leadership Team is elected (1 yearlong term). Two new members, one from year prior.

• Class leaves Symposium with concrete ideas on their project, next steps, responsibilities, and timelines.

Year 4—Semester 1 | Landing the Plane

You’ve entered the closure phase. In the closure phase, you create final deliverables, release project resources, and determine the success of the project. The leadership team should use this semester to figure out how and where to ‘land this plane’? Be honest with yourselves, is the initiative done, or should it carry on through someone else’s care? Can you pitch this idea to your school, another school, a company, or nonprofit? If you’re going to pass this along to a new group, make sure you have all your documents and resources neatly stored and easily accessible.

• Entire class continues to complete tasks, adhere to timelines, and carry out your community impact initiative. It's still live and should be operating.

Opportunity for community members to help Scholar class ‘shop around’ their initiative. Community members should be encouraged to think about who needs to know about this project, who might want it, and who might it benefit within their networks?

Year 4—Winter Break Meeting | Celebrating a Job Well Done

This is a virtual event, entire class attendance mandatory. Leadership team schedules and manages the meeting for all attendees.

Leadership team presents to entire class, staff advisor, community advisor, and applicable community members about the final outcomes of their community impact initiative. This should include an honest assessment of their initiative, next steps, and final lessons learned. Staff and community members in attendance 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!

• Opportunity for community members to be made aware of the class’s final report and attend the presentation/receive a copy.

• Class should leave this meeting with feedback to be incorporated, clear roles assigned, and timelines established in finishing your initiative and creating a high-polished Final Report.

Year 4—Semester 2 | Final Report. Closure.

Leadership team spends this semester carrying out their final closure plan and creating a high-end Final Report. 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.

This report should encapsulate the entire Community Impact Initiative process, the outcome of the initiative, lessons learned, next steps, recommendations for Greenhouse Scholars and school leadership, and all takeaways from this experience. By the end of this presentation, we should all have a better idea of how to solve the problem that the class has been trying to solve for the past 4 years. We should also have a better understanding of how to make this component even better for future classes.

Congratulations on four years of teamwork, entrepreneurial thinking, project management, and working towards solving a real-world problem within a real-life context. You should be proud of your work and share your accomplishments with friends, family, and in your future careers.

Thank you on behalf of everyone at Greenhouse Scholars.

Year 4—Symposium | Closing Remarks

This is it. This is your last Summer Symposium and your last chance to share with us the lasting mark that you and your peers have left on the world. You’ve now successfully spent 3 years learning, creating, ideating, and digging into a societal issue within a real-world context. You have shown true entrepreneurialism by creating your own solution to a problem and seeing it through until the end.

During this Summer Symposium, give a presentation which encapsulates this experience. Think about what you’ve learned through this process, what surprised you, and what you’re taking with you. Focus on your successes, failures, and what they mean. Tell us about the status of your initiative and its future legacy in the world. Be proud of what you’ve accomplished and allow us to celebrate all your hard work.