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| Author's Family Member Used With Permission |
If you are reading this and intend to read it all the way through, then enjoy these next one thousand words. I promise to make it as interesting as possible, so thank you for reading. So it all starts with my experiences, where I have been, what I have done, who I have met, and most importantly, how collaboration ties into all the above. My entire life I have been a tad bit more “tech savvy” I guess you could say. I just think I always had a thing for technology and it became a big part of who I was. When I was younger I had a YouTube channel with my best friends and we always came up with funny dances or skits and posted them. That is basically where the collaboration began. I have always loved working in groups; I come from a very big family so I was raised that way. I also played sports my entire life so collaborating was the only way to get things done. I am very independent, yes, but I truly do work well with others as well. In fact, I tend to enjoy being around others and working with others more than I do working on my own. So that is where a lot of my collaboration came into play.
My first real experience with collaborating is my family, friends, and I came together and created a foundation in my brother's name. He passed a few months short of his seventeenth birthday. He was riding his skateboard and tragically was struck by a car and passed away on impact. Now, do not take this as a sob story because I am most certainly not trying to make it that, I am just sharing the purpose for the foundation. After he passed a friend brought up that there are not safe places to skate in Anaheim Hills and that the closest skatepark is in a city fifteen miles away. So we decided to create a foundation called “Skatepark for Logan” and we have been raising money in order to build a safe place to skate in our city. This is a great example of what I read about in “Cultivating Communities of Practice” by Wenger. We became a community of practice, we all had the same concerns and were all passionate about the same topic. We spent time together and shared insight. We ended up “sharing a common sense of identity (Wegner, 2002, p. 9). The collaboration in this has started with friends and family coming up with good ideas for fundraising that we could hold in order to raise money. Then we had to collaborate with the city and set terms on where the skatepark can be built along with how much it would cost. After two years of going back and forth, sharing ideas and concepts, the city and our foundation finally accomplished the goal of locating where the park will be built. Now we have a property we can officially say is for our skatepark and it will be called “The Logan Wells Memorial Skate Zone.” Here is an image of the sign on the property we have decided it will be located. This entire situation took a lot of work, dedication, and collaboration to get done.
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| Author's Family Member Used With Permission |
It reminded me of an article I read in class about called “The Five Stages of Group Development” by Tuckman. This article goes into depth about groups, how they work, and the stages they go through to either succeed or fail. Here is an example of the way each stage works and what happens in the stages of group development. When you are involved in a group you typically go through these stages of development. This is exactly what my family and friends, along with the city, did when we created the foundation.
We started off in the forming stage. The forming stage is where all the group members come together and need one another for security. They obtain their impressions of who can handle what. Along with attempting to become oriented with the over goal along as with one another (Tuckman, 1977, p. 1). We were seeing who was going to be involved in working on the fundraising events and how the money would be handled. Mainly there was the excitement of starting a foundation for something we were all so passionate about. We did not debate roles or any tasks yet in the forming stage because we were just starting off the foundation.
Then we went into the storming stage, where members start to become more felixble and learn to fit certain positions in order achieve the overall goal as a group. This is where we gathered impressions of who can handle which tasks and who would be put in charge of what. We knew the adults needed to get into contact with the city along with handling the money. While my siblings and friends were more on the tech savvy side and created a hashtag to raise awareness. The hashtag was “#skatepark4logan” and we also created an online petition to gather signatures in order to get the city to consider a skatepark. So the foundation website was created by the adults and then the young adults handled their end of spreading the word.
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| Author's Family Member Used With Permission |
This lead to the norming stage, where the cohesion in the group really starts to form. Members are willing to work with one another and change things around to better suit the group. The members all truly identify with one another as a group. Therefore, this stage allowed the adults to handle talking to different companies to see who would host fundraising events while the young adults looked into the logistics of what it would take to create the park. We discovered that we needed ten-thousand signatures for the city to consider the petition and with the help of the hashtag and the people in my group, we got over twenty-thousand signatures. We DOUBLED the amount we needed, all by spreading the word through social media. The foundation had officially had its own website, donations were pouring in due to the social media exposure, and the city was able to be approached with the petition to build the skatepark. This norming stage really got the ball rolling because we all worked together on certain roles that ultimately lead to the beginning of the performing stage.
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| Author's Family Member Used With Permission |
The performing stage is where everything truly starts to come together. This is where the group officially becomes productive and starts accomplishing tasks to reach the overall goal. The loyalty, strength, and drive in the group are higher than ever before. Solutions arise and achievements are made. Therefore this stage for our foundation was and still is, incredible. My parents and their close friends hosted multiple 5K runs, along with golf tournaments, and more in order to raise money. Right now we are not far from having the amount necessary to build the skatepark. They also have been in and out of very serious meetings with the county board along with the board of the city of Anaheim Hills. After all the meetings and the pushing and pulling, we finally secured the location for the skatepark. So the land is ours and we are just looking to finish the blueprints and finish raising the money in order to start building it. We are almost reaching the goal, which is the grand opening of the skatepark, all in honor of my brother. I still continue to work on the social media aspect with my siblings and friends. We all still post on big social media accounts and we also work together on the content we put on the foundation page. You can take a look here at SKATEPARK 4 LOGAN
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| Author's Family Member Used With Permission |
We have not reached the adjourning stage yet, that will happen when the skatepark is built. The adjourning stage is when the group completes and accomplishes the goal they were set out to do. Once that goal is achieved the group no longer has a purpose as a whole so the members disperse and go their separate ways. But luckily, the group I have is not just brought together by a boss or a team, but we are family and close friends. So when the park is finally built, we will all actively still be in one another's lives, forever. No goodbyes will be made and no separating either. My collaboration is the best, for the best, with the best.
Here are the links to the sources that I cited:
Wenger, E., McDermott, R. A., & Snyder, W. (2010). Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Tuckman, B. (1965) Developmental Sequence in Small Groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63, 384-399.
Tuckman, B. & Jensen, M. (1977) Stages of Small Group Development. Group and Organizational Studies, 2, 419-427.
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