A Day in the Life: Building Community Engagement at the University of Kansas

Max Lillich, serving with the Center for Service Learning at the University of Kansas, navigates a day of developing the Student Community Action Corps initiative, crafting outreach strategies, and reflecting on the impact of his Campus Compact VISTA service.
Max

Hello everyone, my name is Max Lillich, and I serve with the Center for Service Learning at the University of Kansas. My day started at around 8 am when I got up, got ready, and made my way to campus. I made it to the office a little early, so I had to start my day out with the NYT Wordle, connections, and mini crossword. At about 9 am I started working on a brainstorm document for the Student Community Action Corps (SCAC). The Student Community Action Corps is an initiative at my host site that I am tasked with helping to develop. In its current form, we partner with various organizations to provide service-oriented employment opportunities for students. Additionally, our office provides the student employees with training and support. We are currently experiencing some troubles with the current iteration of the SCAC, so the purpose of my brainstorming document is to come up with some alternative models for the program. I came up with a few ideas and listed their pros, cons, and logistics. I finished up with this document around 11 am and then began developing a poster for a new SCAC position. When finished, I will send this poster out to a bunch of campus entities in hopes that we get a healthy applicant pool. 

I took about thirty minutes to find pictures from my university's photography database that I felt really conveyed the essence of the position. While looking for these pictures I ate my lunch. Typically, I bring lunch from home, but today I felt like treating myself, so I got Jimmy John's. When I found these pictures, it was off to Adobe Illustrator to develop a template for the poster. Illustrator would be my home until my weekly Campus Compact VISTA meeting. The weekly meeting started at 1 pm and went on until a little before 2:30 pm. In this meeting we did an exercise evaluating where we are at in terms of money, impact, and expression and where we want to be in the future. I realized I value all of these items pretty highly, but impact and expression the highest. I then got to go over this exercise with some other members of my VISTA cohort. It was super interesting hearing other people's evaluations and life after service plans since everyone's varied quite a bit. Once the meeting finished up, I continued with my work on the poster, adding a QR code, and some text and ensuring everything looked good. Up next, at around 3:30, I began to develop an outreach plan for the position, figuring out what offices, departments, and student groups I should send the poster to. I compiled a list of these organizations' emails and created a draft to send them about the position. I decided it would probably be better to send the emails the next morning, as opposed to letting them sit in their inboxes for the evening; so, with that, my day was over at around 4:45.