One response to “Coffee With Strangers”
-
I’m not going to lie, I struggled with this course as a whole. Adel had great insight and was very knowledgeable, but for my particular brain, the course structure was difficult for me and sent me into a stress spiral most of the time. That said, by the time I got to the end, I felt like I had come up with a pretty great idea. Coffee with Strangers came to me as a way for people like me to make friends, but I also wanted it to be something that could be ‘kitted’ or boxed so that people all over the country (world?!) could set up these little events to build community wherever they are. I had originally planned to do this as my Capstone Community Change project, and I think it would have been a really good one. But, realistically, this was a bigger project than I could accomplish while in school and working, both literally and emotionally. Capstone was supposed to be small and scary, this was going to be big and terrifying. But it’s something I want to do in the future, and I am incorporating parts of it into my Capstone workshop. In order to make decisions together you have to know each other, and care about each other, and you don’t do that just sitting alone at a table. You do that by interacting with each other. So I’m going to bring a lot of these practices to the workshop. This can also be something I begin to integrate into future workshops that I do. Maybe this doesn’t become it’s own thing so much as an integral part of the other work I do going forward. I really do love the logo though, so I’ll have to figure out a way to use it. (Just realized this deck doesn’t have the logo in it – I’ll try to find it and add it.
The process of getting to this project was painful for me, but it introduces the ideas of iteration and biomimicry to me. I’m really not sure I got it while this was all happening, but that background exposure made it so much easier to process and build on in later courses from Kiley and Denise and MJ. Looking back, I see how it all fits together, and I see why we went through the process we did to get there.
Leave a Reply