Working With Fishers City Councilman Todd Zimmerman
Challenge: Find a way to increase voter efficacy and student involvement in and awareness of municipal government
|
Group Members:Abigail Writz and Haeli Juthani
Project Timeline:
- Our First Meeting: 10/26/17
- Before our first meeting we met as a group and talked about the type of questions we would like to ask Councilman Zimmerman in order to better understand our challenge. We then had our first meeting on the 26th. We discussed not only the challenge he gave us, but also about what he did, and why he chose this particular problem. We discovered that he picked this problem because only 3-4% of Fishers residents regularly vote in local elections. We also learned that in trying to generate creative solutions to solve this problem he wanted us to focus on getting students involved.
- First Proposal Meeting: 11/9/17
- Before our first proposal meeting we did a variety of things to prepare. We first presented our idea to our class, and had them comment feedback on sticky notes to help us start off our ideation process. Also, individually we each did a lot of research of what had been done in the past to solve this problem. After doing this, we presented our newly formulated ideas to the class and received a lot of helpful feedback, from the content of our ideas to the flow of our presentation, and our presentation skills. After doing this, we had come up with a document containing several of what we felt, were our strongest ideas to present to Councilman Zimmerman. At the meeting we shared our ideas, and wrote down feedback that he gave us to help us to improve on our "plan".
- Final Proposal Meeting: 12/7/17
- Before our final proposal meeting we discussed the feedback the Councilman Zimmerman gave to us. Then we began reaching out to a variety people to see if our "plan" was even a possibility. We met with Larry Lannan, who creates podcasts, and has a blog about Fishers. Meeting with him was an amazing experience and he volunteered to help us create a podcast for our project. We also reached out to the other Fishers City Councilmen, in order to see if creating a Fishers youth City Council similar to the Mayor's youth council would be a possibility. We then proceeded to have our final proposal meeting presenting the information we had gathered, and what our best idea of our final plan was. After the meeting we discussed as a group, and overall we felt like it went really well.
Our Final Presentation
My Contributions |
Personally I played a large role in communicating with our community partners and others who helped us develop are soultion to our given challenge. I also specifically played a role in researching the possibility of a creating a voter event, and found an interesting Yale study that had been done. I also worked on the possibility of creating podcasts as well as a student resource canvas page.
My Takeaways
I think this was an amazing experience getting to work with our local city government officials. I also think it was an awesome networking oppertunity. We got to meet people and do things we would have otherwise never had the chance to. There were a few challenges we had to overcome and the biggest being that we are all extremely busy people, and so finding time within our schedules to meet and work on this project was quite the struggle. We overcame this challenge by focusing on our communication skills. We all had to know what was going on at all times and be extremely organized in order for our group to be succuessful. Also in order to overcome this challenge we all had to try our best to be flexible in whatever ways we could be. Overall, even though we faced some scheduling and time conflicts, this was an amazing oppertunity where I got to go out of my comfort zone and work on this really cool project.
What Would I Change?
If I were to do this project again there is really only one thing that I would have wanted to change. This is that I would have narrowed down our ideas more from the beginning. I think that if we had done this we could have created something even cooler, as we would have been able to take the time to really dive into, research, and work on making one idea excellent. Instead of just trying to make our 5 or 6 ideas good. Other than that there is not much I would change, and I was happy with the way my group worked, the time we put into this project, and all that we accomplished,