Creating Change

Out of the Seven C's, it is extremely important to keep in mind one above all others: Commitment. As Wagner states, "Commitment requires an intrinsic passion, energy, and purposeful investment toward action. Follow-through and willing involvement through commitment lead to a positive social change." Commitment seems to bind all of the other C's together. It implies that if one is truly committed to something, then they will work towards that with all of their passion in such a way that will produce the best outcome. It necessitates Consciousness of Self and Congruence, it strengthens Common Purpose, Collaboration, and Controversy with Civility, and it builds Citizenship.

Commitment to a just cause is something that I highly respect from people. It shows both their motivation and determination to make a difference in our world. However, it is disheartening to see how many people do not achieve this. Every person has the ability to become a change agent, but they just need to receive the knowledge and means to do so first. A person can not effectively create change without taking the proper steps. In many cases, if the proper steps are not taken, the outcome could be negative even with good intentions.

The biggest challenge to becoming a change agent is a person's environment. This can be a seemingly insurmountable hindrance to one individual. This is the reason that most people to not become effective change agents. Many people around them do not commit to the same purpose in their daily lives and if a person does not receive help, it is easy to be discouraged. It is also easy to look around at the actions happening around oneself and become disgruntled with humanity. Recently, two of my friends' houses were broken into, trashed, and looted. Another one of my friends was involved in a hit-and-run. These negative actions stand out much more than the positive ones to most people. I urge people to use these negative actions as an example of what we should not do to our fellow human beings. One can also delve deeper and find out why these actions are occurring. I find the most uplifting action is to think about how many people would not commit such horrible acts and look at all of the good in the world. Malevolent people are truly in the minority, but we need to make this increasingly so.

A Glimpse At The Future

Each one of our past actions have defined who we are today. By making educated decisions now we properly prepare ourselves for what is to come later. These decisions should all work together to attain one main goal. To understand this goal, this purpose, one must truly understand what motivates them and what is truly important in not only their life, but other people's lives as well. I have struggled to find this my whole life and I am only beginning to get a clear picture of what I want to accomplish in my lifetime. Of course I will say that I want to look back upon my life and feel that I have made a difference, but what is difficult about that is finding how I will make a difference and deciding what steps I need to take to achieve that goal.

Before I could truly define my goal in life, I believe it is necessary for me to experience more than just Ohio, more than just the United States, and more than just living in a cozy lifestyle that so many of us take for granted. There are so many people in this world who have much worse experiences than we do and we are constantly too consumed by our own lives to realize it. I have not experienced anything even similar to their lifestyles and I would need to expand my views before really deciding how I can make a difference.

Currently, I'm simply trying to finish my mechanical engineering degree at Ohio State, while bettering my fraternity. However, I do not really want to continue pursuing my degree. It just seems like what is expected of me by my parents and today's society in the United States. I will probably use my degree to find a good job to be financially stable, but what I really want to define my life is what I have learned about leadership and the relationships I have made with others. I do not want to look back from an office job when I am older and realized that I have done nothing to help others. Realistically, I would like to find a job in mechanical engineering that actually helps those in need, but still I don't believe this is really what is necessary to make a difference.

There are many people who make a difference in today's world. Whether it be giving to charity or doing community service activities, these people are helping improve the lives of others. These sometimes small actions can add up and make a huge difference. However, this might be my ego talking, but I want to make a strong, impactful difference that everyone could set apart from these smaller actions. To do this, I would need to step outside of the norms and honestly I am not sure I am ready yet. I look forward to gaining a better understanding of myself and the world as time passes on. For now, I will keep my mind open to new ideas and new experiences.

Working Together

It is necessary to work together with others in many situations. No matter how much effort one person puts into a project he or she could never do better than if they were working in the right group of people. However, the emphasis must be placed on the RIGHT group. Even with the best intentions, groups without true collaboration do not succeed as well as the ones that do have this dynamic. Collaboration is based upon trust and inclusiveness. These two attributes are sometimes hard to attain in a diverse group of people, but it also must be emphasized that diversity can bring differing opinions to a group and can produce greater success.

When groups work together though, they might fall into other categories such as compromise. This is most often the worst case scenario, because groups fail to reach the goal that they set or do not reach it to the best that they could have achieved. Compromises focus too much on being fair and is a quick fix for making everyone happy. Competition is better for the group, but does not help with working together with other groups. Competition can motivate individuals to do better, but it can sometimes lose sight of the true goal. I would rank cooperation as the step below collaboration, in which different groups work together to attain their individual goals. However, in varying cases, sometimes true collaboration is not necessary.

For example, if the situation is somewhat trivial, compromises can achieve a solution in a much shorter time. Think of designing a shirt for recruitment in the Greek community. A simple vote or compromise could determine which shirt to buy out of multiple designs. Then, the group could focus on the actual goal of recruitment rather than spending hours and maybe even days on collaboration to create the best shirt design. Competition is also healthy at times. Competition can be an easy way to motivate people to do better. Competition can set an easy goal of doing better than another group. This goal could be something that all the members of the group could relate to and achieve. A goal could be recruiting more members than Organization X and Y. However, this goal would usually leave out the creation of connections with Organization X and Y. Cooperation could also be better than collaboration if the groups were so extremely different that it would be too difficult to create mutual goals. Still, in most cases it is better to strive for collaboration as long as time allows. In the long term, collaboration will usually bring about a higher quality outcome than simply working together.

My Ties To Citizenship

Growing up, I always viewed citizenship as either voting in elections or participating in community service. I was ignorant in my belief that community service was just a chore that would make a college application look better. I spent my life too concerned about my own well-being at the time and did not look towards what I could do to affect my community and my life in the future. I now realize that every action has some effect on the community around me, and vice versa. The realization of this symbiotic relationship has caused me to put more effort into improving the community around me.

The first change in my view of citizenship came from joining my fraternity. It places an emphasis on human service and this is something that I am currently striving to improve. Too many times it seems that people are only focused on their lives as I was before. Sometimes members of my chapter even fall into this category even though they are supposed to share the same value as me. I see citizenship as any action that positively improves the community that one is a part of. This broad definition stems from the wide variety of citizenship that I mentioned in my previous post.

My fraternity began expanding my view by giving me the opportunity to volunteer at the Ronald McDonald House on a bi-weekly basis. This was one of my first structured acts of community service. As I became more acquainted with the Greek community at Ohio State, I found other ways to serve my community as well. Every chapter seems to hold at least one large philanthropy event annually and I did my best to participate in every one I could. These events can raise large sums of money for charity, but alone my actions were relatively small. Participating in a sports tournament or buying food at a sorority event takes little effort from me. However, the combined actions of the hundreds of people that also participate do add up to a greater cause.

So far these acts I have described can be categorized as bonding, which refers to social networks that have little diversity. These networks can be limited because they can be too focused on a few similar goals. Bridging however, breaks this limitation by expanding the network to include a more diverse group of people. These people can have differing views that can offer positive benefit through controversy with civility. Bridging is an idea that we need to hold in the forefront of our minds, because people too easily fall into the ease of simply bonding. Through bridging, not only between different chapters, but also other non-Greek orgnizations, the Greek community would have the ability to take their citizenship to a higher level.

We Are The Change We Seek

As President Obama is coming to Ohio State this Sunday, 10/17/10, I find it fitting to base this post off of a quote from him:

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

Too much of the time it seems like people are waiting for others to take the initiative. Some people do not know how to initiate change and do not believe they have the power to do so. This concept seems to spread like a virus through most of society. That is why that when leaders do emerge to take the first step, many people respect the power that they hold. These people then have the opportunity to participate in active citizenship.

Citizenship can take on many forms and many people have differing views of what good citizenship entails. An individual may participate in community service, further the education of the community, involve themselves politically, or participate in community-oriented organizations. This wide variety of ways to participate could be the reason that there is a disconnection between the sense of community that people have and the what they want to result from their actions. Many people's communities are separate from one another. People simply do not conceptualize the whole community that they are apart of. Everyone is connected in some way and each and every one of us has the responsibility to contribute to the well being of humanity even if not everyone realizes it.

There are multiple stages of community, but many communities do not reach the last stage of actual community. Some live in the false sense of pseudocommunity in which harmony is held above controversy with civility and compromises are made that negatively impact the community.  The second stage is chaos in which differing communities have unconstructive struggle in which neither will give way. The third stage before community is organization. In this stage, small fixes are used to overcome hardships, but preventive care is not taken.

There seems to be so much going against the select few people who become leaders. However, the most discouraging obstacle is the people who are not motivated enough to take up the cause as well. This is a problem that many chapters in the Greek Community face here at Ohio State. I have been through this myself as I have grown in my leadership experience. This is a good learning experience, but it is hard to overcome this hardship without the help of others. I felt this way in my first few years and only through the counsel of my other similarly motivated brothers did I gain the experience to become the president of my fraternity and gain the authority to create the change to better my fraternity within the community. We cannot simply wait around for change because it will not occur. We must be the change that we seek.

Social Change and Me

"Leadership for a Better World" stresses that social change and leadership go hand-in-hand. Even though I do not totally agree with this concept (I believe that leadership does not always have to result in social change), many connections can be seen between the two. Thus, as a leader, I see many instances of social change. For me, social change most often starts at the group level with my fraternity. As I mentioned before, this soon becomes relevant on a much larger scale.

The main idea that I need to keep in the front of my mind is the difference between single-order change and transformative change. Single-order change can be accomplished within the preexisting procedures and ideals of the organization. Transformative change is much more informative and challenges these preconceived notions of what the organization should be. I have experienced single-order change and it is not effective at all. When I became a member of my fraternity and soon after the treasurer (one of the highest leadership positions in the chapter),  I was constantly surrounded by the implementation of new documentation or programs that provided quick fixes to a problem and enabled the person who created it  to show it off as a "Hey, look at me and look what I did!" However, this was really all it was good for. Most of the programs were not followed because nobody really had a stake in them. This also, brings us back to the concept of collaboration. Individuals must collaborate on an issue to make sure their actions will actually be profound and motivating enough to have an effect.

I am glad that I read this section, because it gave me a wake up call as well. I found myself falling into the same pit that many presidents before me have done. I created a new academic plan, supplementary pledge packet, new initiate packet, recruitment standards, calendars, etc. Most of these were done without collaboration between my other brothers and if collaboration did occur it only happened with one other person. I now see that I need to involve other people in the process. This is the only way change can be effective. I must promote controversy with civility so that new ideas can be brought to the table. I am happy though, because we formed many new committees at our last chapter meeting and it was refreshing to see how many people wanted to get involved. I will keep you updated on this situation, but I am glad to say that I am looking forward to reporting positive progress this year. I also hope that my leadership style will evolve through this process and participating in discussions surrounding "Leadership for a Better World."

Rough Sailing on the Seven C's

Implementing social change is not easy. If it was, we would all be living in the perfect utopia of a world. However, I find that the effort you put in to overcome obstacles is usually worth it in the long run. As the saying goes, "Nothing worth having in life comes easy." This is caused by the fact that the problems that need to be affected by social change are usually deep-rooted and take more than one person scratching at the surface to have any long lasting, positive effect. The book, "Leadership for a Better World" describes the Social Change Model of Leadership and the Seven C's: Consciousness of Self, Congruence, Commitment, Collaboration, Common Purpose, Controversy with Civility, and Citizenship. These seven individual, group, and community values must work together to cause social change.

Take Acacia Fraternity as an example. Acacia holds ties to the Masons, a distinguished organization that is now viewed as an extremely secretive cult whose purpose is shrouded in mystery. Through history, Acacia has struggled to keep these ties intact. At first, only Masons were admitted to the fraternity. Subsequently, Acacia voted to accept members who simply pledged that they would become a Mason and in 1933 the Masonic prerequisite was done away with altogether. This change was necessary to enable the fraternity and its motto, "Human Service" to stay intact, thus bringing about greater social change.

On a small scale, one may think of a member of Acacia Fraternity at Ohio State affecting the fraternity and affecting the Greek Community at Ohio State. On a larger scale, one can see this same member affecting the Acacia International Fraternity and thus affecting the world. A member of Acacia Fraternity must have Consciousness of Self, Congruence between his words and actions, and Commitment to his passion to become a successful leader. Then through Collaboration with his brothers and Controversy with Civility, which breeds new ideas and changes, the group can share the same Common Purpose of Human Service. This ideal can be seen through the Citizenship that Acacia Fraternity members exhibit in their community. Through Seven Days of Service, Acacia Claus, and local philanthropy events and community service projects, members of Acacia strive to help the patients of Shriners Hospitals for child burn victims and other noteworthy causes.

It comes down to a numbers game. One person can have an effect on dozens of individuals who form a group and that group can affect hundreds of people in a community. However, it does not stop there. These hundreds of people motivate the individual, thus refueling and shaping his or her life so that even greater social change can occur. In this way, one person can make a difference in the close to seven billion people that inhabit the world.