Pnw Food Pantry Reflection Paper

Tyler Garzinski

OBHR 44400

Prof. Williams

December 12, 2016

PNW Food Pantry Reflection Paper

        During this last project we had for class it made me consider and incorporate all that we learned during our lectures in class and apply it to a real world situation. For this project we were assigned a group based on what organization we chose to represent and lead to improving overall. While the other groups were dealing with already established groups, the group my group chose to represent, the PNW food pantry. The PNW Food Pantry was an idea created about a year ago that would provide meals for students of the PNW community that could not afford to support their diet while in school. While previously it was found that there was a need for the pantry we were assigned to figure out how it would actually be operated with open hours and who would be in charge of the food pantry. This made our group members think critically and creatively to come up with various options and then coming to an agreement on the optimal solution for our project. Even though this project was met with ups and downs while trying to figure out the best way, in the end we came up with the best option to benefit our fellow student community and developed our leadership skills along the way.

        For this project I was working with fellow classmates that I have not worked in a group with before so it took a little bit of time to figure out. If I apply to this group to what I learned in the classroom I would say we had a Laissez-faire leadership style at first, which is a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course without outside interference. While this style is acceptable when everyone working is on the same page and worked for some in our group it wasn’t the best style because not everyone was completely clear on what their responsibilities were. When we were working on this, myself and a few others in the group realized that having a project with this many duties and responsibilities that we would have to establish some type of order to be able to thrive as a group. With that being said we implemented a democratic type leadership within the group. With having this it made sure that everyone in the group was contributing and putting effort forth while also letting each person complete their work in a way they were most comfortable with. This turned out to be effective and we saw a lot better work coming in from each person in our group. With the different types of styles we learned in our lectures I believe that this would be the most effective for most projects that have a lot of people working on it, such as our Food Pantry project, because people can work in their most effective way while benefiting the group as a whole towards success by having to be accountable.