Leadership Impact Project: Concussion Awareness Project

Leadership Impact Project: Concussion Awareness Project

When the Leadership Impact Project was first introduced to the class, it seemed a bit daunting. A long-term project with broad parameters that expected us to actively improve our community left so many open ends for individuals and project groups to tie up. However, as soon as my group and I decided upon the cause that we wished to pursue, we were able to made headway in determining what our mission was for our project, what our goals are, and how we aimed to achieve those goals.

Recent happenings in the national and local arenas with regards to the tragic and life-threatening effects of concussions inspired us to pursue the cause of concussion awareness. 

Impact Project Statement/Goal:  Raise awareness about concussions and the effects of concussions in our GBN community.

Through inspiring our peers to take ownership of their health and well-being, we aim to empower our friends and help them protect themselves both with regards to athletic activities and everyday life. By educating others about the risks, signs, and effects of concussions, we hope that students will be more apt to protect themselves and demand change with regards to sports and activities that currently put their health at risk.

The Original Plan:

At first, we hoped to schedule a guest speaker knowledgeable about the risks and effects of concussions to speak to the GBN community about any information that students and parents should know to better help protect themselves or their loved ones

The Problem:

Although we were passionate about this plan and had already researched local experts who could present to the community, we began to realize that this idea would be a little too risky for us to undertake. We came to the realization that motivating students, our primary target audience, to attend the speaking event would be incredibly difficult and rather impossible seeing as most students don't even go to the school team's basketball games.

The Plan 2.0:

To make our Leadership Impact Project more manageable and effective in being able to reach our target audience, we decided to take a more public route. Instead of attracting a guest speaker, we decided that we would create informational posters to post around the school to communicate our information to our peers.

The Plan 3.0:

After our first peer-review session in which our classmates critiqued our first action plan, we came to the conclusion that we needed to be a little more ambitious with our planning. In addition to the flyers, we would also create a large-scale poster to hang somewhere around the school, and create a facebook group to encourage our peers to pay attention to our message. With this plan we would reach our target audience more effectively.

Success Criteria:

Determining the success of this project, we discovered, would be the most difficult part of this whole process. How would we really know if our campaign had made a difference? To answer this question we will make a survey asking students if they had seen our efforts and then to judge whether they had at all been impacted by them. We hope to have a 75% success rate out of those surveyed.