As the title for this week's blog implies, I have recently discovered the way I shall use volunteerism to fulfill my platform of preserving culture/history. A couple of days ago I filled out a volunteer application to work at the library in downtown Florence. I see two ways I can preserve history at the library: first, all books are documents of history; second, I recently talked to someone about starting a video production program at the library maybe next semester. I think that teaching kids about video production would be a good way to volunteer my time at the library that could teach future filmmakers how to preserve history (through video of course).
Moving on to last week's speaker, the Honors Forum was visited by Mr. Jackie Hendrix, the chairman of the Shoals Chamber of Commerce. I'll admit I was going through one of those "who am I?" crises that young adults go through so I was a bit spaced out during his address to the class, but I took some good notes regardless. The idea that he brought to our attention most throughout his speech though was to get out in the community and NETWORK. See how I put that in bold? That's because it's an important thing to do. Networking involves getting out into the community and making connections with people. Depending on which kinds of people you network with, this can help you get jobs or improve a resume. Mr. Hendrix also made us aware of something called the 80/20 rule. It states that 20% of people involved in something do 80% of the work. Getting involved in community service and being a major contributor to that service is very important as well. So the next question that was brought up was, "How do we make time to get involved?"
Mr. Hendrix's answer to that was to not have children; Okay I'm on that boat with him, but I also have many school affiliated things that I'm involved with on top of 18 hours of class this semester. Fortunately the library that I signed up to volunteer for works around my schedule. This speaker reiterated what all the other speakers told us about civil service--that it's the socially responsible thing to do.
Networking can also help find commonalities and raise a level of comfort among persons in the community. However, becoming too comfortable with someone may lead to a bias known as Peter's Principle; Peter's principle entails the promotion of a likable person to the level of incompetence. We need to watch out for that when networking.
The last piece of advice Mr. Hendrix gave to us was to "keep showing up to the party." Basically don't give up or quit your civic service.
Time to go do more work...we'll see how that library service thing turns out; I'm still waiting for a call back from them. Bye bye.
