Founder’s Day and LI Opening Keynote by Co-Founder Victor Roy
by Bianca Nguyen on September 1, 2011
On Thursday, September 1, the 2011 Class of Chapter Founders joined together at GlobeMed's national office headquarters off Northwestern Univeristy's campus for the 2nd annual Founders Day. This opportunity gave students the space to voice excitement for the year ahead, collaborate on 2011 Class Goals, and delve into deeper conversations around both personal and organizational values. On Thursday evening, an additional 50 chapter leaders from across the nation joined the Chapter Founders for the official kick-off and LI Opening Dinner in downtown, Evanston, which featured a special keynote by GlobeMed Co-Founder, Victor Roy.
For the rest of the weekend, Emi Kihslinger (Founder, University of Washington - Madison) and Colleen Bell (Founder, Whitman College) will provide perspective as 2011 Chapter Founders, blogging about their experiences through the rest of the Leadership Institute.
Colleen Bell, 2011 Chapter Founder, Whitman College
Day 2: Reflections from Thursday, September 1 | Founders Day
Wow. What a day. So much information is packed into my brain right now that I'm not sure where to begin. At 9:00AM, we headed over to GlobeMed's National Office for the Founders Day kick-off. With all of the 2011 Chapter Founders seated around one large rectangular table, it was the perfect opportunity for bouncing ideas around and fleshing out our goals for the upcoming year.
The Run Down:
We went over GlobeMed's history and learned a ton about the way ideas, conversations, and people came together to form this movement. It was so valuable for me to see the trajectory of growth of this organization. At any and all phases of GlobeMed's expansion, an ongoing conversation has been happening from involved parties: Where do we want to take this movement? How are we going to take it there? How big can we dream, and how high can we shoot? And each time, the sky is the limit. It was helpful for all of us new, nervous, chapter founders to do a session on reflections from GlobeMed's class of 2010 Chapter Founders, and as the subtitle said, learn "Lessons from [GlobeMed's] first phase of growth." It was emphasized that we need to build a really solid base of community within our chapters, as well as cultivate great relationships with our partners before the organization could start branching out to hundreds of fundraisers and thousands of members. These lessons will be essential to the success of the new chapters.
In addition, we also had a critically important discussion based on an article we read about defining core values. I'm really excited to get other Whitman College folks on board so we can start having a conversation about the most important values to us and making them an integral part of GlobeMed at Whitman. I must say, though, that one of my personal favorite parts of the day was our partnerships discussion. I am so unbelievably excited for GlobeMed at Whitman's partnership with Burmese Women's Union (BWU). On my first skype call with Thwel Zin Toe, it was an amazing experience to hear her story and how she became involved with BWU. She is really looking forward to working with college students, and I think it's safe to say that we are both really excited to choose our project for the coming year and form a tight bond! (Stay tuned for more information about BWU on http://www.globemed.org later this month.) The partnerships talk gave me strategy and ideas of best practices from across the network on forming positive partner relationships. Lastly, we ended with a powerful session in which we collectively set 2011 Class Goals. After initially nervous discussion from the founders, we set a high (but reachable) combined goal of raising $70,000 for our partners and projects. Yes, let me repeat that again. $70,000. Check back in with us at the end of the year to see how we did!
After deciding upon this large number, we joined tens more Co-Presidents from across the network for food and conversation at the LI Opening Dinner. As a whole, the 2011 Chapter Founders were incredibly excited to see so many experienced chapter leaders, a few of whom were last year's successful chapter founders. This gave us courage for the journey ahead of us, and their presence at the LI provides great opportunity for us to talk with them and ask them questions. After dinner, we had small group conversations about what inspires us, and then we headed back to the hotel, as it was after 10:30 PM and time to get to sleep in order to make the most of tomorrow!
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