Collaboration & Shared Leadership

As a UW Bothell student, one IAS objective I’ve been able to build upon is collaborating with my fellow peers and taking a leadership role to better understand my group members’ strengths and abilities. Being a Community Psychology major, it’s important for me to strengthen my people skills since my future occupation requires me to understand how other individuals relate to their communities and vice versa, especially in cooperation and management. Out of all the projects that involved me working with others, I felt there were two artifacts that best defined how I grew as a leader and team player. These two artifacts are my CBLR Reflection Paper and Black Lives Matter Group Project.

During my BIS 226 Foundations of U.S. Social Service class, I was involved in a Community Based Learning Research (CBLR) project, which required me to volunteer at an organization that’s helping those in need and write a paper reflecting on the experience. In this assignment, I recapped my experience on being involved in the CBLR program, especially when it came to my time volunteering at the Northshore Head Start Preschool Program, sponsored by the Center for Human Services in Bothell. I also go into detail on what type of work I did at my place of volunteering and how it related to my IAS learning goals, especially in collaboration and shared leadership. This artifact is meaningful to my portfolio because it’s a point in my college career where I actually got to volunteer at a community that needed all the help it could get, which relates to my Community Psychology major. Also, my work at Head Start not only gave me the opportunity to empathize with kids that were forgotten by the system and need guidance from people that understood their pain, but I also gained further insight in the types of trials and tribulations I will need to understand in the future if I apply for Social Services.

In my BIS 313 Issues In Media Studies course, I worked in a group to write about the history of Black Lives Matter and how this activist movement was significant in bringing attention to systemic racism against Black People. Direct focus is given to the originations of the movement and how my group argued its importance through lectures, small group discussions and seminars. We also discussed examples that relate to the foundation of Black Lives Matter and incidents that continue to evolve the movement even further, such as the shooting of Michael Brown. What makes this artifact important to my portfolio is that it embraces the IAS goal of Collaboration and Shared Leadership, which involved me learning to cooperate with others to achieve a shared objective.

I feel that the most important aspect of leadership and collaboration is ensuring that everyone has the equal opportunity to contribute so that we can become better listeners, critical thinkers and build trust upon each other. Whether it’s through CBLR work with those who need the most guidance or cooperating with other people to further develop shared ideas on issues such as systemic racism, I believe my artifacts exemplify how I went from being a follower and independent worker to a collaborative contributor and leader. And as I look to the future, I feel confident in being able to work with anyone in fighting to eliminate our world’s problems when I graduate.