Honors First-Year Experience
The Honors First-Year Experience provides many tools for success, but it can only be achieved if you practice them. Through numerous interactive workshops and lectures, I have been exposed to the ideas of group leadership dynamics, productive problem-solving, and intentional actions and thoughts behind activism. These ideas paved the way to a capstone community project where as a group of twenty-two students we were given a unique opportunity to make a difference in the San Luis Obispo community. Here I will go into further detail on my project: the Restorative Partners Garden.
Restorative Partners is a non-profit organization that "serves people impacted by crime with a continuum of services and programs designed to meet their diverse needs.” My group was specifically partnered with the LyonHeart State Parolee Reentry Home which is housing that “provides a clinically structured and supportive environment for returning men that are in need of reentry and recovery services.” Their main need was for a productive vegetable garden, to provide fresh produce to eat, as well as to be a means of revenue when selling excess produce at the farmers market. Our group was preparing to design, raise funds, and install this garden when unexpected circumstances due to COVID-19 sent us home and moved this project online. We were able to refocus our goals and decided to design all parts of the garden that we could and it pass down to the next group or help install ourselves once back in SLO. We began this process by conducting extensive research on parole involvement with gardens and outdoor spaces, benefits of gardening, and successful gardening practices compiled in the annotated bibliography posted above. We broke into three subgroups to better focus on bed design, irrigation work, and development of a garden guide with selected plants and growing information.
This project provided a path to share my leadership skills and project management capabilities. When in-person meetings were still occurring I put together agendas for every meeting that included topics to cover and questions to ask. I helped lead these meetings and focus our overall efforts, which was a challenge at times due to the mere size of our group. As the leader of the Irrigation Sub Group, I was responsible for attending ZOOM project meetings where I represented my group's ideas as well as took notes and reported back to my team of what other groups were doing and the next steps to take. I identified and delegated tasks as well as provided due dates and reminders to my team, always offering a helping hand when asked form. I took initiative in designing the final version of our presentation material by focusing on polishing the writing, flow of the board, and including better graphics to make it more visually appealing to the reader. The before and after slides are posted above. Through this project, I learned how to adapt to online work and the true importance of communication and saw what happens when it is both strong and lacking. Good communication is a group effort but there are things that I as a leader have learned to do better at such as sending check-in messages, asking questions that warrant a response, and using direct and positive language.
Overall, my group was successful and produce a comprehensive plan for designing the garden and raised beds, an irrigation system, and a garden manual with produce already picked out and categorized with harvest times, watering and spacing needs, and any other bits of important information. We hope that these plans will be utilized in the near future and a productive garden will bring many benefits to this part of our community.
Restorative Partners is a non-profit organization that "serves people impacted by crime with a continuum of services and programs designed to meet their diverse needs.” My group was specifically partnered with the LyonHeart State Parolee Reentry Home which is housing that “provides a clinically structured and supportive environment for returning men that are in need of reentry and recovery services.” Their main need was for a productive vegetable garden, to provide fresh produce to eat, as well as to be a means of revenue when selling excess produce at the farmers market. Our group was preparing to design, raise funds, and install this garden when unexpected circumstances due to COVID-19 sent us home and moved this project online. We were able to refocus our goals and decided to design all parts of the garden that we could and it pass down to the next group or help install ourselves once back in SLO. We began this process by conducting extensive research on parole involvement with gardens and outdoor spaces, benefits of gardening, and successful gardening practices compiled in the annotated bibliography posted above. We broke into three subgroups to better focus on bed design, irrigation work, and development of a garden guide with selected plants and growing information.
This project provided a path to share my leadership skills and project management capabilities. When in-person meetings were still occurring I put together agendas for every meeting that included topics to cover and questions to ask. I helped lead these meetings and focus our overall efforts, which was a challenge at times due to the mere size of our group. As the leader of the Irrigation Sub Group, I was responsible for attending ZOOM project meetings where I represented my group's ideas as well as took notes and reported back to my team of what other groups were doing and the next steps to take. I identified and delegated tasks as well as provided due dates and reminders to my team, always offering a helping hand when asked form. I took initiative in designing the final version of our presentation material by focusing on polishing the writing, flow of the board, and including better graphics to make it more visually appealing to the reader. The before and after slides are posted above. Through this project, I learned how to adapt to online work and the true importance of communication and saw what happens when it is both strong and lacking. Good communication is a group effort but there are things that I as a leader have learned to do better at such as sending check-in messages, asking questions that warrant a response, and using direct and positive language.
Overall, my group was successful and produce a comprehensive plan for designing the garden and raised beds, an irrigation system, and a garden manual with produce already picked out and categorized with harvest times, watering and spacing needs, and any other bits of important information. We hope that these plans will be utilized in the near future and a productive garden will bring many benefits to this part of our community.
