ambassadors
the journey
During the summer before my senior year at BYU, I became heavily involved in a department on campus called The Center for Service and Learning, or Y-Serve. This Center organizes 70 different programs around the community, and volunteer student leaders direct each one of them. I joined the Marketing Team as a part-time student to help spread the word about the different service opportunities available at Y-Serve. After a few months, I became a program director for a smaller external marketing committee, and began looking for ways to help connect Y-Serve to other departments across campus.
In a team meeting, the Ambassador program was proposed as a previous capstone project from a previous semester. As an external marketing team, we were given the task to explore this project and see where it could go. After weeks of research and meeting with various members across the organization, I took on the responsibility of getting this program up and running. I searched for Service Ambassadors to connect student across campus to the many programs Y-Serve has to offer.
WHAT I DID
As the Executive Director of the Ambassador program, I organized every aspect, from creating trainings and implementation plans to recruiting and interviewing students to pick the perfect team of 14 Ambassadors. Coming across new challenges, the program continues to develop. We are striving to shape service into a meaningful experience for hundreds of volunteers and search for the best ways to communicate to students in various majors and departments around Brigham Young University.
ambassadors
Ambassadors help connect specific Y-Serve programs to the various colleges across campus. Responsibilities include communicating with the leaders of the programs related to their assigned college and both passing and presenting these service opportunities to the faculty and students within the school. This program is designed to connect students to service opportunities that are relevant to their majors, where they gain experience in their field while helping others in the community.
the program
the lesson
My favorite part of this experience so far has been not only shaping the program into what I wanted it to be, but what it needed to be to connect students around campus to meaningful service opportunities. If you want to change someone’s life, you can. I’ve realized how much I love taking something small and simple and turning it into something that helps people think outside of themselves and do good in the world. I've also learned that there are people everywhere looking to get involved and help out those in need. This has been an incredible opportunity to see how many people there are who genuinely want to do good, even in places we would never expect to find them.
THE WORK
As the Executive Director of the Ambassador program, I create spreadsheets, Google docs, and other visuals for both recruiting and organizing the new program. This is a project that continues to evolve and develop, but my main goal is to play my part in connecting students across campus to meaningful service opportunities.
This program continues to develop every day. The original idea was successful but as we discovered a
more prominent need, we adapted to the most effective process moving forward.