The planning of our trip to Camp Heartland has been going on for just about two weeks now, so I'm going to do my best to summarize everything that's gone on so far.
All of the trip leaders (there are 11 total Buck-i-Serv trips happening during winter break) meet every Thursday night to get direction on planning our trips and facilitating the discussions and participant dynamics that may occur on our trips. The first meeting involved meeting your co-leader (all trips, with the exception of one, have two trip leaders) and beginning the discussion of the goals for the trip.
Kristen and I talked a lot about how we want our trip to be educational in nature. We're dealing with a sensitive and current issue (HIV/AIDS), and we really want to create and environment on our trip which fosters learning about the issues that children affected by HIV deal with. The reason that it was necessary to immediately begin discussing what kind of trip we wanted was because we were picking our trip participants over the course of the next week.
The selection process for applicants was more difficult that either Kristen and I had anticipated. We were given blind applications with just basic information - year, major, etc. We found ourselves looking to questions which showed what a participant could bring to the trip - a willingness to become educated, a sense of humor, and a desire to experience a new type of service trip. We're still not sure who are participants are (we find out during this Thursday's meeting).
The next trip leader meeting focused on pinning down the leadership strengths (and weaknesses) of the trip leaders. We completed a survey (facilitated by the Student Leadership Advocates - http://ohiounion.osu.edu/csls/sla.aspx) that alerted all of us to our strengths as leaders and also let us know what aspects of our leadership style to work on. I, myself, need to work on "inspiring a shared vision" as a leader - I think working to organize this Buck-i-Serv trip will be the perfect way to go about it.
Another thing that we began to discuss were trip logistics. The Camp Heartland trip is unique in that way - our entire trip is completely contained within the camp grounds, with the exception of a one-day trip to the Twin Cities and/or the Mall of America. Kristen and I have been talking a lot about what to do in our "down time" - how is our trip going to socialize in a contained environment? We also completed a leadership survey, which allowed us to tell our co-leader which aspects of the trip we would be best at leading. Luckily, we ended up picking strengths that the other co-leader didn't pick, complementing each other very well (so far!) on how we lead.
Additionally, I called Camp Heartland this week. Everything's set up for us to go ahead with our trip, and they're really excited to work with us - they've been working with other Alternative Break programs and have a long history with Ohio State's programs.
This upcoming week, we'll be meeting with our trip participants for the first time (hooray!) and listening to a speaker on our specific issue.
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