SPA Leadership focuses on developing leaders for their students, as well as deploying those students into real action. I am a member of the Economic-Inequality group, in our first semester we researched the importance, effects, and lack of financial literacy and financial education. After our research we knew we wanted to spend our second semester addressing the problems we found. So, I researched multiple charities and organizations who address financial literacy, and reached out to them. We partners with the Society for Financial Education and Professional Development. We set out to do fundraising for the organization, with a goal of $500. About a month in we passed our goal, and set a new goal of $750 which we met just recently. As a capstone of our project, we will be hosting Ted Daniels (founder of partnered organization), for “Mind Over Money Skills Personal Money Management Seminar.”

 

Over the course of our project, we utilized the leadership tactics from Strength Based Leadership, and The Five Dysfunction of a Team. Strength Based Leadership helped us identify our strengths and how we could most effectively contribute to the team. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team helped us identify our bottle necks and how to address them. We had a great team and were very effective in our roles. Me and Alayna Chichester focused on building connections with the partnered organizations, Joanna focused on managing the funds, and Natalie and Keighly focused on the social media for our project.

 

The project has really made me grow as a leader. I used to focus more on individual work, where everyone plays their part. However, through this experience I saw how coordination and collaboration really builds the brand of the project as well as incurring great communication across team members.

 

Now in my second year of SPA Leadership, I researched the economic factors in military recruitment. One of the things I found was that veterans often do not maintain the financial stability they found when enlisting. I am going to be doing a networking and business event with American University’s military and veterans club next semester. This is a small step, but one that can still have a local impact.