Casey Clay: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
As a Santa Clara business student, it’s basically a given that a class will have some type of group assignment. Depending on the members of that group, the project can be amazing or be a nightmare to work on. Luckily enough for me, my team at the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits is a joy to work with.
Last Friday, January 19th, SVCN hosted their annual Health and Housing summit, which highlighted ways fellow organizations have been helping out in Santa Clara County. Organizing the event was a huge team effort as we each had our own roles to play. While the event had been in the works for a few months, there was still a lot more that needed to be done in the weeks preceding the summit.
The policy team was in charge of researching interesting topics and finding appropriate speakers who were knowledgeable enough to host engaging dialogues with the audience. All in all, they did an amazing job in facilitating discussions like ‘Creative Solutions to the Housing Crisis’, ‘Food as Medicine’, and an informative talk about medical cannabis. Although I was taking pictures during the event, I was enthralled with each of the sessions we had. I ended up learning a lot about the community’s growing problems and the real solutions being implemented.
As part of the marketing and communications team, I assisted with the design and wording of the pamphlets we handed out to all the attendees. Initially, we requested for every presenter to send in a short bio so that our guests would have a better idea about who was speaking. Most of them were far too long, however, and we set out to shorten them in order to fit our tight space limit. As a marketing major, writing succinctly while still keeping the core message intact is important. While I initially thought this would be easy, in practice it was much harder. I ended up shortening the bios to the best of my ability, then sending it off to my supervisor for the final revisions. With enough practice, I think I will only get better.
For the summit, I was mostly in charge of building the PowerPoints that would play behind the speakers and during the dead time between sets. I love graphic design, and had a blast creating a theme that would look nice but was simple at the same time. In the end, I was very pleased with how it turned out, and that theme became the basis of all of the pamphlets for that event. If nothing else, planning this event showed me that with a group of hardworking people with varying strengths, you can create something better than the sum of its parts.