My Simple Community

August 23, 2010

Welcome back to school. If you are a freshman, I hope the excitement never wears off, but the nervousness definitely will. If you are returning to school, you have a great opportunity to have a meaningful and powerful impact on an incoming freshman. Offer a hand, carry a load, ask if they need help finding their way around. Offer to be a resource to get connected. It may never mean more than during the first week of classes.

If you are staff of faculty, you have been down this road for a lot of years and it is easy to forget how big a transition this is. In many ways, your reaching out with a kind gesture is a better offer of community than that coming from a fellow student because you represent the new extended community of young adults away from home for the first time.

Yes, it’s true. Students would rather connect with other students. But a very important part of college education today is to teach/remind ourselves as well as students that we need broader community beyond our family and closest friends. Those who work at colleges are in the best position – and the first week is the best of the best – to extend that hand.

July 6, 2010

If you have anything to do with a college or university, the odds are you have a bit of down time right now. So NOW is the time to think about and take in community around you. When you are back in school in the Fall you will be fully engaged with academic pursuits – which is a good thing.

But almost without exception, that pursuit will take place on one of America’s most amazing potential centers for community activity, the college campus.

While you are out of school and off campus take a moment to do an inventory.  What do you have on campus that you do not find in your community? Whatever that is, it is an asset that could draw your campus neighbors to your school and increase the interaction between your school and the town where your school is located.

Think of it as another kind of homework. Yes, I am asking you to take a bit of work home as the traditional definition implies. But think of it as considering ways you can make your campus more a home come, more a community, for everyone around.

Good part is, there will be no grades for this assignment!

May 25, 2010

I publish a column quarterly in Sports Business Journal and will have a lot of new research published and distributed in primarily the sports industry in the next few months. I want to illustrate, with pictures, the importance of everyday people enjoying one another at sporting events.

It just struck me I could accomplish two goods in one. If you could send me pictures from your school, I can speak directly to the good things happening in DII and your school (I will credit both the school and photographer in anything I use).  That is the second good.  The first good is anything that encourages those who invest in sports to do more for everyday fans.

Please send your pictures with school name and photographer to mail@mysimplecommunity.com.  Thanks!

May 16, 2010

We are four years into the completion of the basic community engagement strategy with NCAA DII schools and a lot of new things continue to happen. I recently spent quite a bit of time looking through several things individual schools are doing and noticed a few really important elements that seem to make a big difference on impact.  So I thought I would provide The Check List so you could see if there are opportunities for your school – and so you can see how you are doing when it comes to extending your community.  I will present them two at a time over the next several posts.  Here are the first two.

THE CHECK LIST:

·         EXTENDING BEYOND SPORTS: Staying on campus for a moment, when you provide opportunities for other people to do things, how often do you:

o       Invite and involve other sports teams to participate in your team’s activity? (This happens a lot, but how about...)

o       Invite non-sports campus groups to work and participate with you? Think student government, fraternities and sororities, music groups, drama, student volunteer groups, service groups, art, film, faculty, staff, alumni

o       Promote the events and activities of other sports and events beyond sports like music, art and film?

o       Attend as a team or sports group activities beyond sports?

o       And going off campus, when you do things with and for the community, how often do you ask non-sports group to participate with you?

Extending beyond sports will pay many dividends. Others on campus may think the sports program is off on their own island. Anything you do to focus attention on others will be appreciated – and rewarded – with great campus support for sports. Think how you would feel if 20 people from the art program showed up at one of your games. They would feel the same if you did something more to include them.

·         ENGAGEMENT, NOT JUST SERVICE:  You really get to provide “the fun part” of life – relief, enjoyment, fun, a break – sports refreshes us.  Community engagement is much more about extending the enjoyment of friendship and social engagement than it is about work.  Don’t get me wrong, community service is an extremely important part of community and you should continue doing it, but who is bringing the fun??? It is also very important.

When we enjoy each other, we like each other more.  When we like each other more, we get to know each other better. When we know each other better we naturally see what others need.  When we see the needs of those we like we NATURALLY care enough to reach out and meet their needs. In other words, we naturally provide them “community service.”  Really…. Think about it… there are a ton of groups providing services.  Who is fostering relationship through the enjoyment of time together?  

Sports leads the way. Let’s make the most of it!

February 21, 2010

Here is a powerful and simple way to energize support for your team.

The home court advantage exists only when your stands are filled with friends of your team – not just an audience, friends.  If you want them to be more than people in the seats, start doing something more for them.

Every time your team practices on non-game days you start by warming up which usually includes stretching exercises and drills. Imagine what would happen if at one practice a week, a “friend of the team” was allowed to participate in warm ups? That would be attractive to a lot of your friends. Let’s take it one step farther. What if at the end of warm ups, the team “played” or scrimmaged for just five minutes and the friend of the team was allowed to play any position on the team he/she chose?

Wouldn’t you enjoy doing that?  To be sure, anyone with interest in your team would be more energized after playing with you.

What would it take to make it happen?

Announce it at a game. Put it in your program. Invite your friends to try. As long as the requests are few, take them all. When the demand grows, make being the Friend of the Team an award and a way to say thank you for the specific things people do to support your team. If it really takes off, you could extend it to every practice and over the course of a season ignite dozens of your fans.

This is the kind of simple idea that has the potential to become something really big. If history is any indicator, one team will try this, have great success, get back to us here on My Simple Community and it takes off from there.  The competitive juices kick in. Another team from another school says “We can do better than that.” And they improve on the program. 

If you do a Friend of the Team idea, please come back and comment or send your story to mail@mysimplecommunity.com.  We want things like this to grow.