Reflection 6 – Personal Contributions

After spending my summer here at FLIP National, I do think I learned a great deal of new information, and also made quite a few contributions to the fellowship and non-profit as a whole. As I am in the Chapter Establishment and Development Team, most of my contributions stem from my work with attending meetings with prospective and established chapters and other related tasks. One contribution I am very proud of is the document I made and shared with the whole team, which are guides on how to meet with chapters. I have a separate document for prospective chapters and another document for established chapters. This serves as a cheat sheet/ script that Chapter Establishment and Development fellows can use when attending meetings. If there are moments when fellows blank out on details, then these documents should help them. Within the documents, I provided a general overview/ script on what FLIP National is, the benefits one gets from becoming a FLIP National chapter, some “juicy” talking points in regards to our mission, and some common questions we are asked and how to respond to them. They are living documents, in that I and others can continually update and add onto the guides. 

Reflecting on the organization and its weaknesses, member/worker retention is rather difficult for them, as many fellows are only capable of working for the summer, or certain semesters, and eventually move on to other opportunities. Given that, it is especially important that there are materials and resources that can help bring fellows be caught up on the current language used in the organization. Given that this is my second summer with FLIP National, I felt like I was in a good position to create such guides. I am also very pleased to know that during our Chapter Establishment and Development team trainings, our supervisor opens up and follows along with my documents to help the fellows out.

Building off of all that I have created, I hope to further contribute by using these resources to effectively facilitate and lead certain meetings myself, without requiring or relying on the presence of my supervisor. I do believe that my team and I have become more and more confident at doing such, which is very promising!