Leadership

Sylvia Dean, Paige Hall, Armando Revelez

Community Building:

Contributing to our team community:

We all brought our own perspectives and beliefs that contributed to the leadership aspect of our team. The members of our Hawkeye Service team come from different backgrounds, this gives a large mix of skills and opinions. Accepting each other's differences, we built a community among-st ourselves that provided service in an effective way to the community of Tulsa.

Some examples of differences:

Armando:

Major: Computer Science & Electrical Engineering

Personal Traits: Hardworking, Methodical.

Paige:

Major: Journalism and Mass Communication & Communication Studies

Personal Traits: Inclusive, positive.

Sylvia:

Major: Linguistics/TESL

Personal Trait: Initiator, cooperative.

Contributing to the Tulsa community:

With the diversity created in our team, we were able to go into Tulsa community and further blend with different personalities.

During our service at the Tulsa Community Food Bank, we interacted with different team communities (Iowa State).

The other communities held very different dynamics in comparison to ours.

Asides from just being a rival school, their team was larger and seemed to bring a lot more differences to the table. This included the way they went about things, often using chants to to keep things "motivational". Our smaller team of 13 would look at each other quietly, disregard the boisterous group, laugh, nod our heads, and continue to pursue the task at hand.

Together we created a larger team community among-st ourselves in order to serve at the Tulsa food bank.

At the Iron Gate food pantry, we partook in helping distribute breakfast and lunch to the local citizens.

Our team's dynamic allowed for us to cooperate well with the existing community staff at Iron Gate. The staff explained to us how the process worked and what to expect so that we could help as much as possible.

During this experience we interacted with the locals and gained an insightful experience into the lives of those living in the Tulsa community.

We were staying in a community center blocks away from the church, and every time we would leave we would see locals on street corners, or they would walk past us on our way downtown. When we went to Iron gate, we ran into a lot of familiar faces of the locals that lived in that area of Tulsa.

Working behind the counter, an active volunteer who knew people by name would have conversation with those coming through the line, and each time they came through we learned more and more about who the locals coming through the line were, from these conversations.

In Conclusion:

During our experience in the Tulsa community our team was allowed to mix in with the local population, as if becoming apart of the community itself.

We were able to learn about the people we served and the people we were serving with, creating communities larger than our own team.

We learned to go into situations without biases allowing the diversity of our team to blend with different community environments. Everywhere we went we applied this ideal to work as a part of the community, so we could work towards the overall purpose of serving the Tulsa community and contributing to food justice.

Team Work:

Teamwork in Tulsa:

Preceding our trip, we discussed in depth the multiple aspects of leadership, including the different ways it may be displayed. In our case, we focused on the social change model of leadership, which encourages value-based, collaborative service.

Teamwork and Leadership:

An important aspect of leadership is the ability to work well in a team. This means facilitating open communication, mutual respect, and working together to reach a consensus.

During our service in Tulsa, we traveled to a variety of locations to provide different kinds of service, all of which required a strong sense of unity among our team members. Many of our tasks were fast-paced and large-scale, and required us to perform individual tasks alongside one another to reach a common goal.

Team members clean up after a morning serving at Iron Gate Tulsa

Team Members develop a system to effective service at the Eastern Oklahoma Community Food Bank

Our Progress as a team:

Throughout our service, our performance as a team grew from disorganized to harmonious. With our success as a team in mind, we each grew to understand the effectiveness of leadership in a collaborative setting, where each member contributes their individual assets to the cause.

Through service, we observed firsthand the impact of teamwork. After each service opportunity, we were astounded at how quickly a daunting task was accomplished when each person contributed a small part. It helped us to put into perspective not only the importance of collaboration, but also how such large-scale organizations such as the Community Food Bank can become so successful and efficient.

Post-Tulsa:

Upon returning back to the University of Iowa, we are eager to address the issues we face in our community equipped with the tools we’ve developed to work in a team, and to utilize this new form of collaborative leadership.

Cultural Consciousness:

Cultural consciousness is all about improving empathy, respect and knowledge. A big part of improving these traits was done through serving with Tulsa's community. Serving with a community contributed to empathy and respect because we were working on the same level as the community, rather than coming in and working above them; this greatly contributed to our ability to practice leadership responsibly. Knowledge about the culture was also gained through conversations with locals during our group work.

Rebecca and Alex study a painting at Philbrook, a Native American art museum, and debate about what it means culturally, and its place in modern American society.

Our service team after serving at Iron Gate.

Our Experiences:

Working at Iron Gate, a non-profit that serves food to the community on a daily basis, was a great chance to converse with the local residents who utilize their soup kitchen. We were able to see emotions and gratitude in action. All interactions here were a great way to practice empathy and cultural consciousness because we could really see and feel what people were going through.

Another great chance we had to learn about cultural consciousness was meeting the students who attended alternative school in the space we slept in at night. Seeing and talking with people close to our age was really eye-opening because we were able to relate very well, even though our living situations were different. We were able to take what we learned from their different lifestyles to understand why we were doing service in Tulsa, and to better understand people from the area.

Myself and several others who were working near me at the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma were able to learn a lot about the political and social economy of Tulsa from a full-time volunteer who shared information about recent events with us. Through this experience we have become aware that people come from different backgrounds, and that there are many different factors that go into how someone communicates with a group. We can take that knowledge and use it to lead with others, rather than leading from above.

So What?:

All the experiences talked about above contributed to the big of idea of serving with a community rather than to a community. This was done by learning to be more culturally conscious about our surroundings, which gave us more empathy, respect, and knowledge about those we were serving with.

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