Barger Leadership 2020 Capstone Watch Party

December 4, 2020

ABOUT THE BLI The Barger Leadership Institute (BLI) is a flexible leadership program for any Michigan undergraduate. As a community of staff, students and faculty, we work to create authentic learning experiences where students cultivate leadership habits and start their life-long commitment to leadership learning.

We believe leadership: • is learned through experience, a continuous process of thinking/observing, acting and reflecting, • includes service to others, • occurs at all levels, in all fields, positions, and sectors, • is relational, it requires both leaders and followers, • is social, situational and cultural, and • is a developmental, life-long learning process.

Students may join the BLI community at any point in their undergraduate career and create their own pathway through the Institute’s programs, events, funding and access opportunities. This provides flexibility of progressing through each phase at their own pace and makes the BLI community as accessible as possible.

A shared focus of BLI programming is the BLI Leadership Habits. We invoke the idea of a habit to signal that mastering effective leadership takes sustained work and systematic practice. The Habits are general. They apply everywhere and can be practiced with increasing complexity as particular circumstances require. You can read more about the BLI Habits here,

THE CAPSTONE EXPERIENCE One of the fundamental skills of leaders is the collection and evaluation of often imperfect evidence in support of decision-making in uncertain environments. Sound, rigorous evidence — its collection, critical evaluation, and use in decision-making — should be the cornerstone of an education that integrates the best of the liberal arts tradition with practical experiences that will teach students the skills needed to address the complex, ambiguous problems that characterize our deeply interconnected world.

Four teams of advanced undergraduates completed their pursuit of significant collaborative leadership projects whose design, implementation and evaluation required significant analytic work. These teams had a capstone experience that brought abstract skills learned in the classroom into sustained contact with practical challenges in global, virtual, and environmental arenas.

AGENDA Welcome and Introductions Fatema Haque, Capstone Program Manager and LEO Adjunct Lecturer Team Presentations and Conversations SIFT co-collab

3 Degrees

Blueprints for Pangaea Closing Remarks

Mary Schlitt, Barger Leadership Institute Assistant Director

THE TEAMS SIFT COLLECTIVE Kevin Liu, BBA & BS, Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 2021 Melissa Brei, BSE, Mechanical Engineering, 2021 SIFT Collective aims to create an eco-fashion marketplace by establishing a universal sustainable fashion standard, closed-loop ecosystem, and integrated partnerships to reduce textile waste generation while increasing the accessibility of sustainable fashion.

For eco-conscious shoppers, it is extremely difficult to find sustainable apparel, and they don’t have the bandwidth to do the research. From the environmental side, 16 million tons of textile waste ends up in landfills a year in the U.S. alone. The best option for eco-consumers is to buy second-hand apparel but much of this does not get resold.

Instead, it is either incinerated for energy use or exported cheaply to developing nations, which negatively impact smaller international communities by pushing local artisans out of business.

SIFT is designed to be an ecosystem to hold sustainability to a highly credible standard against brand partners that are selling their products on SIFT’s platform. Sustainable education will be integrated seamlessly into the shopping experience to help nudge customers to make the right decision for themselves and provide a sense of easy accessibility. Our downcycling initiative will take our consumers’ unwanted apparel and connect that inventory to upcyclers who can make new, innovative, and sustainable apparel out of it. From our focus group, we found that people’s varying definition of sustainability prevents consumers from making eco-conscious decisions and there isn’t easy accessibility to sustainability research, which consumers do not have the bandwidth to deal with. The implementation of our website platform has generated considerable traffic but very few sales.

Consumers like variety, and we are currently unable to offer that, partly due to the pandemic decreasing human resources that smaller brands can employ to partner with us. However, our comprehensive solution is addressing pain points across different stakeholders that generatively creates more value as we build our partnerships.

CO-COLLAB Ariel Huang, User Experience Design & Psychology, 2021 Bre Boersma, Art and Design, 2022 co-collab creates meaningful experiences that foster human connection by developing engaging workshops and art installations for U-M undergraduate students.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, feelings of loneliness, isolation, and anxiety have all risen. Zoom exhaustion and other forms of burnout have become common as our personal, professional, and social lives become inseparable online. Specifically, U-M students have been unable to fully utilize the physical campus to engage with the larger student body. There have been few ways to safely socialize in person or form new relationships online. Therefore, we explored three creative mediums for community building.

First, we invited over 300 alumni to share stories about their favorite places on campus and their college friendships through postcards, which served as a cultural probe and culminated in a virtual installation on our website and social media. Postcards were sent from recent grads as well as all the way back to the 70s and 80s.

Second, we delivered 3 themes of daily creative challenges through email newsletters as simple, accessible ways to practice creativity, accumulating 27 subscribers. Third, we organized a two-week creative bootcamp consisting of five social experiences, providing creative ways to gather and connect virtually. There was a mixture of physical and online, interactive and reflective activities.

Community engagement in a virtual setting is an evolving challenge as we navigate new mindsets and adopt new strategies and tools in constantly shifting contexts. co-collab serves as an initial exploration of using socially engaged art as a method of engaging a college student population.

3 DEGREES Hershy Jalluri, Economics and Psychology, 2021 Stephanie Li, Art & Design, 2021 Rashi Watwani, Organizational Studies, 2022 Conor Flood, Economics, 2022 The purpose of 3 Degrees is to break down the challenges that pose as barriers for U-M students to lead more sustainable lifestyles, specifically within the realm of waste reduction. We concentrate on using the off-campus environment that U-M students often interact to help address these barriers.

Our original project design heavily involved using a bulk-buying model to reduce the prices of compostable products for local restaurants. By only incentivizing a lower price scheme, the design assumed affordability was the only significant reason entities don’t purchase compostables, while only targeting the demographic of local Ann Arbor restaurants with large student consumer bases. With COVID-19 being a large setback with our restaurant communication, the 3 Degrees team had to develop ways to effectively act on our mission, with our main business model avenue cut off. Exercises such as ecosystem mapping, a campus climate survey, benchmarking, and focus groups helped us understand our ecosystem better and re-pivot accordingly. We identified other important barriers to address besides the lack of affordability of compostable products- including a lack of education, convenience, and community accountability. With this, we began an alternate four-pronged strategy to our mission: marketing, education, can recycling, and our bulk-buying model, with Greek Life as our primary target audience.

The implementation of our marketing strategy has led to a complete rebranding and a blossoming of an online presence through our growing Instagram account. On the education end, we have completely developed two education modules on sustainability. We got our can recycling and bulk-buying proposals approved by the Interfraternity Council and are in contact with a multitude of Greek Life organizations, along with securing our supplier for compostable products. We have also started can collection in two fraternities. Our biggest conclusions have been the importance of bold outreach, constantly reinventing, and building long-lasting stakeholder partnerships.

BLUEPRINTS FOR PANGAEA Yash Patel, BBA, 2023 Maithelee Sathe, Public Health, 2022 Grant Veldhuis, Industrial and Operations Engineering, 2023 Blueprints For Pangaea (B4P) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit medical surplus recovery organization (MSRO) that provides sustainable solutions to inefficient health care resource distribution. B4P is a network of university chapters united in addressing global health care inequalities by reallocating excess, unused medical supplies—that would otherwise be discarded—from U.S. hospitals and suppliers to areas of need overseas. B4P then arranges transport of these supplies to foreign hospitals, enabling affordable, higher quality patient care overseas. With fewer medical resources to process, our partner hospitals are able to cut expenses and reduce their environmental footprints while gaining community goodwill.

The Blueprints For Pangaea Inventory App helps expedite the inventorying process for our donated medical supplies. By scanning a medical supply label, the app quickly stores key information about supplies, such as their pricing information, quantity, identification number, and more. This app is intended to help medical surplus recovery organizations, such as Blueprints, automate their processes to better keep track of what supplies are available and then quickly send those out in times of need. Our project was split into two components: a software development side and a medical supply pricing database side. Through our project, we were able to complete a preliminary version of the front-end and back-end of the application. We were also able to build our knowledge about medical supply pricing data and how to develop our own pricing database.

The London Idea was created to celebrate the legacy of Adam London, a 2011 graduate of the University, majoring in Organizational Studies. He was an innovative ideator, a passionate creator, and an avid explorer. In 2017 The London Idea and BLI began their partnership to fund, mentor, and develop a London Idea Project - a group of proven undergraduate student leaders with a strong foundation of an idea to build. The London Idea's partnership with BLI continues Adam’s work connecting people and ideas.

Blueprints for Pangaea was chosen for The London Idea 2020 Project

STAFF & FACULTY

BETH CAIN-TOTH Public Relations Coordinator

MELISSA ELJAMAL Chief Administrator

FATEMA HAQUE Academic Program Manager, LEO Adjunct Lecturer

RAM MAHALINGAM Director

SHARANYA PAI Capstone Graduate Assistant

ELIZABETH ROHR Academic Program Specialist

MARY SCHLITT Assistant Director

BRIANNA SUGGS Capstone Graduate Assistant