empowering our advisory committee
*One of GDL’s newest initiatives is BEI, Bagar Employment Institute which my team members and I started up as a means to provide industry relevant training to community members. While we see value in charging for our classes, we also don’t want the fees to be a barrier for people to take them. Hence, we’ve decided to give scholarships to deserving candidates. However, even with our contacts in the community, it’s difficult for us to determine who should receive scholarships just by talking to or interviewing them. With that in mind, we created an advisory committee comprised of seven community members who will decide whether scholarship applicants should indeed get scholarships (either partial or full). *
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*Thus far, we’ve had two meetings with the advisory committee. The first introduced them to the idea behind the committee and the second was an update of what we had done in the month between the first and second meetings in terms of our courses. In the second meeting, advisory members were asked to attend the career day that we were organizing as one of BEI’s promotional events and as a way to heighten awareness about different careers, industries and job preparation. *
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*On the day of the event (today), only four of the seven advisory committee members came. I know I shouldn’t undervalue the importance of those who came but I would have liked if they all had attended. So the question I have now (before the next advisory committee meeting in about three weeks) is, how do I get advisory committee members rallied around BEI and their role in it? Perhaps getting publicly recognized for their role would help. The counter to that though is that if many students begin learning that they are the individuals who are deciding on who gets scholarships, they may start getting too much unneeded attention from such students. *
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*I still have three weeks until the next meeting to think about other ways to involve them in BEI or how to make their own involvement more interesting for them. *