One Paw at a Time:
A Service Learning Project
Documentation of team processes
Our group worked well together for the majority of the semester. Our group would discuss our personal lives at the beginning of meetings and that helped our relationship as a group so it was enjoyable to go to group meetings. This caused our group to procrastinate with assignments and we probably dealt with more stress than we needed. We would get work done individually, but it took us awhile to divide up the tasks among ourselves if the tasks didn’t fall under our project role descriptions. Our group would book study rooms in Carrier library and we would meet at least once a week on either Tuesday or Thursday.
Challenges
About half way through the semester the Adoption/Rescue Coordinator and our main contact, Taryn Bromser-Kloeden, resigned and left her replacement in charge of corresponding with us. This became a major issue for us because Taryn never informed us when she was leaving and when she did all communication came to a halt. Her replacement did not have the login information to either email address that we used to communicate with Taryn and therefore cut us off. This was also a major issue because this was right before the Chili’s proceeds night and we were relying on the SPCA to hand out flyers that were sent to Taryn. It was also a problem because along with being right before the proceeds night it was about a week before the event that we had been planning all semester. This is when communication with a higher up was most crucial for us and not having that complicated a lot of our plans.
The Howl-O-Ween event was the event that our group got to plan for the SPCA. This event fell on James Madison University’s Halloween and homecoming weekend. The football team had a home game and our group couldn’t attend our homecoming game because of the event. This wasn’t a huge deal for our group, but it was still disappointing when we all realized that we couldn’t go to the game.
As a group, we have realized that sometimes unexpected circumstances occur and we would have to deal with the uncertainties we faced. For example, Sydney created a “photo booth poster” for the Howl-O-Ween event for visitors to take pictures with. Unfortunately, during the night prior, the kittens she was fostering chewed on the poster, leaving the poster in fragments. She did not have time in the morning to create a new one, and the group had to accept the fact that our event had to continue without it. We came together and realized that some situations are out of our control.
Unfortunately the RHSPCA could not afford to provide us a budget for promotional materials or for event planning. So instead we got materials from the dollar store as well as used materials we already had. We also took advantage of free printing at our apartment's office for hand outs and pictures for the display.