I believe that through my work as a Lead Forward fellow I have grown in three key areas in accordance with the seven C’s of social change leadership model - Change, Collaboration, and Controversy with Civility. 

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Change

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Starting with the Change ‘C’, through BSAN, I have learned the value of taking risks and novel efforts. Change is unlikely to occur by repeating the same processes, thus necessitating some sort of paradigm shift in the way we approach an issue. Starting BSAN itself was exemplary of engaging with the Change ‘C’. There is no other university SUD awareness campaign documented, meaning my other co-fellows and I had to start from the ground up in building BSAN and, through much trial and error, identify best practices. 

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Personally, an important ‘risk’ I have learned is important to take for change is networking. By putting myself out there and talking to just about whoever will listen about BSAN, I have observed the strong positive effect of networking. You never know who may be interested and what sorts of unique inputs the people you talk to can provide. For instance, I am a volunteer with the American Red Cross Club here at Purdue and talked about BSAN’s work, which led us to provide an educational presentation to Red Cross club members, allowing us to expand our impact beyond just those who are typically interested in SUD education (usually pharmacists). 

Moreover, being consistently open to networking has proven helpful. An example of this can be seen with our tabling at one of the Harrison Residence hall health fairs in October. While Rachel and Alyssa managed our table, I decided to go network, visiting each of the other tables and sharing our contact information. This ended up being a great way to identify new stakeholders, with there being representatives from the local SURF recovery center and Drug Free Coalition, two organizations that we did not identify in our initial local search. These organizations have served as great resources for BSAN with one of our guest speakers for our Summer Send Off being a representative from the SURF center and the Drug Free Coalition connecting us to additional opportunities, such as a presentation opportunity at a Tippecanoe Health Department meeting. 

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Collaboration 

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Within BSAN, there are a few different spheres in which I act as a collaborator - within the co-fellow team, within the impact team, and within the larger BSAN team. 

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Within the co-fellow team, I have grown in terms of my ability to integrate different skills into cohesive efforts. Rachel, Alyssa, and I are all similar in quite a few ways, with all of us, for instance, being biology majors. That being said, we also are quite different, leading to us three having different ideas and approaches. For instance, for our podcast, we all had slightly different ideas as to the most important information to include. Given we had a time limit, we engaged in active discussion on the topic, allowing us to leverage the strength of our ideas into one product. 

Additionally, at first, our exact roles within this smaller team were unclear, but with time, we established different domains that each of us ‘specialize’ in. For instance, I often manage logistics for event collaborations and meetings, Rachel manages data, and Alyssa manges external communications. While we of course do not stick to solely these roles, I have been able to see how effective this type of collaboration can be.

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Within the impact team, I have learned about the importance of communication in effective collaboration. Towards the beginning of the year, I struggled to keep up with the vast amount of information to share with our mentors, leading to some meetings running over time. I learned what it means to streamline communication and emphasize key details. 

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Finally, within the larger BSAN volunteer team, through collaborative efforts, I have been able to refine my leadership philosophy. I have learned that my leadership style centers around facilitation. Facilitation is all about simplifying to support progress. It means synthesizing information from various sources to construct a possible plan of action (a structure), then relaying this to others to help inform collective decision making. In other words, you pave a rough path from point A to point B. 

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At tabling events, I aim to facilitate by giving volunteers the rough ‘structure’ (e.g., key information to share, different communication strategies like suggested starting phrases). This helps ensure that efforts are concerted, somewhat standardized, and ultimately effective. That being said, I also aim to give volunteers some autonomy, asking their thoughts on best practices and allowing them to lead most discussions with attendees at the tabling events. 

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Controversy With Civility

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This was an interesting ‘C’ to learn more about through BSAN. Before BSAN, I did not really engage much with contentious issues. While the best practices for SUD treatment and stigma reduction are well-established, there are still some varied opinions out there, making it a somewhat contentious topic. Through tabling in particular, I was able to practice active listening more and advocating for my point of view. My impact story (see "Initiative Impact" tile on home page), for instance, describes a scenario in which through disagreement, I was able to gain better insight into areas for growth for our tabling practices. Being able to disagree and discuss a topic civilly is something I know will be useful later and I now feel much more equipped to engage with.