SPA Leadership- Economic Inequality

For my action project this past semester, I worked within my group focusing on issues within the field of economic inequality. When conducting our research, our issue group decided to focus on addressing financial literacy as an underlying cause of this issue.

In executing our action project, we decided to partner with an organization called the Society for Financial Education and Professional Development, which delivers seminars across the country and primarily at historically black colleges and universities to educate people about issues in financial literacy.

In collaboration with this organization, we ran a social media campaign project to bring attention to our cause and raise money to support the continued efforts of their organization. And in addition to this, we are also bringing them to speak at AU about college students and financial literacy.

In the end, we managed to raise $684 to support our partners, and we hope that by bringing attention to this issue and addressing college students directly, we are able to help people invest in their own financial futures.

My Own Growth

I’ve learned a lot about teamwork while collaborating with my peers in this action project. I have a lot of previous leadership experience where I was the sole person in charge, and therefore I am much more used to running things all by myself and being very hands-on. However, in this project, we were all delegated different tasks and responsibilities, and oftentimes I would have to trust in my peers to get their own part of the project done so that we could all have a cohesive product. This process taught me to trust in other people and hold myself to a standard to ensure the rest of the group could function cohesively. I learned to let others function independently, and built up a lot of trust in my team. I feel that I have become a better leader from this experience and I will be able to build on this foundation to work as a better teammate going into the future.

Team Growth

At the beginning of our project, we had a bit of confusion relating to who was assigned what job, and how we were delegating responsibilities and roles. This caused initial conflict in our team, but we were able to resolve these issues quickly without damaging the long-term performance of our group. This was easily resolved due to the great communication we’ve all fostered in our group, and our ability to trust each other in our individual roles. In the end, we all fulfilled our duties and ended with an amazing project which we can all be proud of.