Project Planning

When the semester started, we created a mission and goal of getting ten new bigs to volunteer to become mentors for the program. Getting new mentors to become bigs aligned with the problem that Big Brother, Big Sisters of Ellis County faces. For BBBS they struggle to find mentors for many different reasons. Becoming a mentor is a time commitment along with the responsibility of caring for troubled youth during the time of interaction. To help us recruit ten new bigs, we were planning a mixer with potential mentors to showcase the relationships with established bigs and their littles. The goal was to have established bigs bring someone in their life that they thought would be a great mentor to the mixer to show interaction with matches and learn more information about BBBS from people like Jenny.

Jenny Bates, our community partner, and area director of BBBS in Ellis county, already had the idea of some kind of mixer because she wanted it to include matches along with potential mentors. As a group, it was our job to plan a mixer that created conversation and interaction between the potential mentors and matches. With Jenny's established community ties, we knew that the venue and food would most likely be donated to the mixer so we did not have to worry about funding for those, which took a great deal of pressure off of us. Venue wise, the owner of Breathe Coffee House in Hays had already volunteered for us to use the building, just a matter of when.

To get a date and time in place it took lots of different people involved. We had to talk with established bigs and get an idea of when they would prefer the mixer to ensure that we had the best turn out for the mixer. We also had to be in contact with the owner of Breathe because we had to coordinate with his schedule and when the building would be available for roughly 50 people. Talking with the owner of Breathe was very helpful because he knew when most college student area, when slow times are, and peak times. Having this information helped us to determine that a Saturday evening would be best.

With a date and time established, we moved on to marketing and ways to ensure interactions. For marketing, we wanted to make sure we had something that draws college kids in, food. We decided that if we could offer some kind of food our numbers of attendance would increase. Jenny knew she had community ties with Pizza Hut and Thirsty's and could most likely get them to donate the food for 50 people. As a group, we tried reaching out to The Press in Hays in order to create a new tie for BBBS but was unsuccessful. When moving forward with food, Jenny thought it would be best for her to talk with Pizza Hut instead of a group member because of the relationships she had with the manager. Because of the coronavirus we never finished out any plans with food.

For the mixer to be successful in ways that were beneficial for BBBS, we needed to ensure interaction with potential mentors, established matches, and employees of BBBS. This interaction would be created in conversations between different people. To create a positive and necessary conversation an ice breaker game was in the works. By creating a game it ensured that everyone present was involved in a conversation with all parties. We decided that to increase the number of potential mentors along with ensuring that people would participate in the game we would have a raffle of prizes. Marketing the raffles were also another way to bring people to our mixer.

Right before school went online we got our flyers finished. The flyers were set to start being distributive after spring break. We wanted to make sure that information about the mixer was not put out too far in advance. Our flyers were going to be put up on the poster route of campus along with places that have ties with BBBS. Flyers were going to be posted at Breathe and BBBS campus along with social media posts from both places. Our finished flyer is attached to the bottom as image one.

After the virus hit which canceled our mixer we needed a plan b. Social distancing knocked off any sort of in-person alternative we could do for BBBS like helping in the office or fundraising opportunity. In the beginning, we were hesitant to solely fundraise because of the rate of employment that was happening around us. After BBBS' annual Bowl 4 Kids Sake was canceled, they started a campaign of The Big Night in. It was advertised as taking your weekly Starbucks money or McDonald's dinner and donating it to BBBS. Throughout the 5 weeks of campaigning for The Big Night in, as a group, we raised $637.

One of the other things we did to help the littles of BBBS was to create food donation boxes to put in the community. Jenny saw that during this time some kids would not have the opportunity of their free breakfast and lunches at school because of the shutdown. It was important to help make sure they were given access to food if a family could not afford three meals a day with them being home now for all meals. Most kids involved in BBBS come from low-income or single-parent homes causing a scarcity in food resources. We were able to place two boxes at little Dillions in Hays, which are shown in image two.

Our end result of boxes for food donation and money raised for BBBS might not have been the original goal of ten bigs but we ultimately were able to fulfill our mission of helping BBBS in an impactful way.