Student Organization Leadership Consultants holding a retreat with Rhody Ridiculousness. Photo by Kayla Laguerre-Lewis.
Over the past year, the University of Rhode Island’s Student Organization Leadership Consultants (SOLC) have had to make some changes to the way they go about conducting business.
SOLC is a group of students that have received advanced leadership training from the Center for Student Leadership Development (CSLD) in leadership and group development. The training involves them becoming more familiar with the CSLD’s core values of inclusion, innovation and ethical and value-based leadership. These students work with student organizations at URI to improve their organizational culture and community through team building and communication.
Usually, they would go on retreats with organizations at URI to help them grow and bond as a team upon request. They will often do activities at these retreats that are focused on improving these skills as well as conflict resolution and team building. However, due to COVID-19, they have had to take the workshop online.
“It’s definitely been a learning curve as far as facilitation goes”, SOLC President Anna Seifred said. “We’re used to being personal and meeting the groups face-to-face, but with Zoom, I think it presents new and exciting challenges.”
She said that despite the change in how they are facilitating organizations, SOLC has still been able to help many student organizations. Last week, the SOLC held a workshop for Alpha Delta Pi, a sorority at URI, that had 150 participants in the Zoom session. The group was split into multiple breakout rooms due to the size, with each breakout room doing a different activity focused on teamwork and communication between members.
They have worked with many different organizations across the University, spanning from Greek Life to Rhody Ridiculousness.
At the start of the semester, SOLC began getting more requests for workshops compared to the previous semester, a semester in which they focused on preparing themselves for the challenges they would face using Zoom.
Both Seifred and SOLC Secretary Lee VanderVeen said that there have been some challenges with the new form of communication. For one, it became impossible to do some team exercises, and they had to work around that.
“We use a lot of the annotate function on Zoom, we do a lot with different word clouds so we just do a lot of visuals rather than tactile things,” said VanderVeen, though she acknowledged that these activities may be harder for people who are more hands-on learners.
Still, despite having to use Zoom both the people who they are working with and they themselves have been able to develop and grow. However, both Seifred and VanderVeen said that they prefer in-person workshops and retreats that have been offered in the past.
Soon, the organization will host a leadership workshop in person for the first time since the pandemic hit, according to Seifred and VanderVeen. They said that the workshop will be socially distanced and will only be for a group of ten.
According to VanderVeen, the organization will also make sure that the participants have tested negative for COVID-19 and have recommended that people who are taking part in the workshop get tested the week of their event.
However, being able to work with people face-to-face is progress that they see as the start of a long road towards normalcy.
“It’s definitely nice that it is such a small group and we’re hoping that once the weather is nicer we also might be able to hold some outside retreats to be then able to have a little bit larger to normalcy,” Seifred said.