Leadership Experiences

AU Saves Lives

Setting up a blood drive was my goal and I was thankfully able to accomplish that goal above my expectations.  I hosted a blood drive at American University at Letts Formal Hall in the Spring of 2019 for one day, with 40 appointment slots.  During the marketing campaign, I named the drive AU Saves Lives.  With the goal at 28 units, we ended with 42 units of blood and saved 126 lives.  It was a very long and difficult road to get everything set up due to jumping through American University administration hoops.  With the help of James Helms I was able to get everything organized and scheduled.

To begin the setting up the drive it required an application and conversation with American Red Cross. I started coordinating with Andrea Tibbs, and American Red Cross representative.  She was very helpful through the whole process.  The most difficult part was dealing with AU, they were very disorganized and did not know how to help me with the process.  I first started to talk to event services, which led me to other offices and in the end I just worked with Mr.Helms.  When I got the room booked everything somewhat fell into place and I just had to advertise the event at that point.  I think I had such a great turn out because the advertisement and tabling worked very well.  The Bleed for the Throne promotion, also was very helpful in getting people to sign up to donate.  The day of, my volunteers dropped out except for Faith, without them I don’t know what I would have done.  I was able to deal with the last minute changes pretty well and I am happy with the results.   As a leader I grew substantially and was able to learn quite a bit on how to deal with issues that pop up and how to stay calm in the moment.  I am very happy with the results from my project and the American Red Cross already wants me to host another one.

Sex Offender Treatment Center

During the Spring of 2020, before the pandemic, I interned at Clinical and Forensic Associates, which is a sex offender treatment center.  The purpose of this clinic is to help with the treatment of sex offenders to help keep the public safe.  Punishment does not change the distortion of thinking that is common in sex offenders and it requires a treatment approach to prevent reoffending.  You can’t keep sex offenders in jail forever or execute them, so these types of clinics are necessary to protect the public.

The main goal for this clinic is to prevent reoffending and help protect society from sex offenders.  This does involve working on the personal level of offenders to understand what led them to their offense and their risk factors.  This is not psychotherapy, but does involve understanding life circumstances and feelings that can affect their sexual offense behavior.  My role in this office is to observe mainly group sessions and some individual sessions.  I take notes and don’t speak unless asked to by my supervisor.  He sometimes asks for my opinion, so the men can hear an outside opinion that is also from a woman.  They usually have a difficult time understanding how a woman would feel and that’s where I come in sometimes.  My supervisor wants me mainly to learn from my experiences and observations at the clinic, with constant dialogue between us to further explore the issues. As a leader in this situation I have learned what moments I need to speak up and the times that I need to allow people to explore for themselves.  The one thing I learned most in this environment is when to speak and how to approach certain conversations.