When building school culture it’s very important to understand WHO your activities are reaching and HOW often you are reaching different groups of people.  Often times our activity programs are only reaching certain groups over and over, while neglecting other groups on campus.

Here is a leadership lesson that I use to drive an inclusive campus culture.

Now, I must be honest, this leadership lesson is not always “fun” to do, but it is necessary to become more impactful on campus and in your community.  This lesson is similar to taking a “BEFORE” picture, prior to starting a diet / workout routine.  It’s not always pretty and it reveals some weak areas… But it helps motivate your student leaders to get better.

STEP ONE:

• List ALL the groups that you have in your community, on campus, staff, and athletics that you seek to serve.

STEP TWO:

• List ALL the activities you currently do to serve the groups identified during STEP ONE.  (The blue dots in the picture above, shows the activities we do for each of our groups.)

STEP THREE:

• Have a small group and whole class discussion about what the “white board” reveals to us in terms of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of our leadership program.
• Identify themes, gaps, markers, or anything of significance.

STEP FOUR:

• Have a massive brainstorming session… Coming up with new and innovated ways to reach ALL groups on campus/community that have limited or ZERO blue dots!
• Create a master plan to target each of the groups identified in STEP ONE.

Your leaders will absolutely BLOW you away with what they come up during STEP FOUR. This leadership lesson has helped my leaders take our program to another level.  We are NOT even close to where we need to be, but we now have so many ideas on what we need to do next.

I know that the TEEN TRUTH: Leadership Summit can be a fun, interactive way to flush out this kind of conversation or you can register for the Four Seasons of ASB One Day Training on October 28th and I can walk you through this process in more detail.