Organization

 Kyndra Hagard - I commented on Group's 1,3 & 4. My My role in this group was to focus on the Actions portion.
Desiree Soptelean - I commented on Group's 1, 3, and 4 blogs. My role in the this group was to focus on the Reflection portion and table. 
Debbie Shidler - I commented on Group's 1, 3, and 4 blogs. My role was to focus on the Introduction and Organizational Structure and Management Features. 

Introduction

     There are several great organizations to work with in Muncie to do the Big Read event. Muncie has a great urban web of community organizations.  A few of the organizations available are TEAMwork, Boys & Girls Club of Muncie, and the Unity Center. TEAMwork and the Unity Center were very excited to partner with this project. The Boys & Girls Club was not contacted because of time constraints, and the group decided to focus on the adult population in the community.  One group member has worked at the Boys & Girls Club facility before and strongly believes that they would be interested in the project.

TEAMwork

TEAMwork is a group of adults that focuses on networking and uniting the community of Muncie. TEAMwork’s mission is to empower people in poverty toward self-sufficiency (TEAMwork). They do this by providing food and connections every Thursday of the Month among other events (TEAMwork). 

The credo is:

We believe a healthy community must work to eliminate poverty, improve health and enhance race relations in order to have a better quality of life. We believe this is a continuous process which is fostered when active citizens and community organizations collaborate (TEAMwork).

The history of TEAMwork started back in February of 1996, a group of adults from various back grounds gathered to make Delaware county a better place to live, work, play and learn (TEAMwork). TEAMwork has ten board members and five staff. Miss Dorica Young-Watson is the contact person for this organization. She is the manager of Community Engagement. TEAMwork operates out of Grace Episcopal Church on Madison Street in Muncie (TEAMwork).

Boys & Girls Club of Muncie

The next community group we thought of working with was the Boys & Girls Club. This facility caters to youth in kindergarten to 12th grade. We, of course, would work with the teens who meet at the Club from 6:30-9:00pm due to the nature and language of the book. The club is located in Heekin Park on the cross roads of Madison Street and Memorial Street (Boys & Girls Club of Muncie). The leader of this organization is Micah Maxwell. There are about twelve staff working at the Boys & Girls Club and they also have a board of directors.  The staff runs several different educational programs such as: BE Educated, BE Healthy, and BE Leaders (Boys & Girls Club of Muncie).

The mission statement of this organization is:

To inspire and enable all young people, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential, as productive, caring and responsible citizens

 (Boys & Girls Club of Muncie).

Their vision is:

The Boys & Girls Club of Muncie is a catalyst for civic engagement, and success is within reach of every child, and whole generations of children are inspired

 (Boys & Girls Club of Muncie).

Unity Center

Group 2 decided to work with the Unity Center. The Unity Center program is overseen by Miss Yolanda Taylor. The Unity Center is located in a low income area and caters to all ages in the community; however they focus on adult programming in the mornings. It is also located in Heekin Park (Unity Center). We thought this would be a great opportunity for us to utilize the facility and the populations being served.

The mission of the Unity Center is:

Unify the Muncie community by enhancing quality of life for all of its residents in a safe,         comfortable and supportive environment with cultural, educational, recreational, spiritual experiences and development of life skills, values, health and well-being (Unity Center).

The vision is:

As a result of the Unity Center… Children will learn, Families will be strengthened, and Seniors will be cherished (Unity Center).

            All of the organization fit the Big Read initiative. The mission of all the organizations is to better the lives of the community members young and old. A partnership with any one of them would be beneficial to the community and the Big Read. As stated before all the organizations contacted were receptive of the idea of Big Read and wanted to be involved. The Boys & Girls Club was not contacted due to the focus of Group 2 on adult population in Muncie.  

Organizational structure and Management features

            The different organizations available operate in many different ways. They are unique in how they utilize the several theories talked about in class. Some of the organizations are not traditional so they use the theories in another manner. Two of the organizations that group 2 used are local to Muncie; which were TEAMwork and the Unity Center. The Boys & Girls Club is national, but each Boys & Girls Club is operated on a charter so the community and its members are heavily involved. 

 

Actions

The organizations we are utilizing are all civic agencies. They focus on community engagement and promoting healthy habits and lifestyles. We, as future adult educators, must appreciate the value these organizations hold. In the article, The Critical Role of Adult Educators, it states, “Conceptualization of community norms and behaviors through community expectancy provides adult educators with a mechanism for understanding constructs” (Deggs, Miller 2011).  As we are learning all organizations operate differently. Learning the format of multiple organizations can help us see what best practices for various non-profits.

Boys & Girls Club of Muncie

The Boys & Girls Club utilizes a departmentalization structure for it management operation. This does allow The Boys & Girls Club to probably have the best ability to reach a large crowd due to being a part of a national organization and their many affiliates. The downside would be if we lose someone or you don’t have luck with that contact, you may not be able to gain proper communication. The organization has an executive director, two assistant directors and nine staff members; as well as many volunteers.  Of these employees, one assistant director and five staff members are responsible for programing. They would have the ability to not only promote, but also help organize outside vendors such as us that want to host an event in partnership with them.  We chose not to work directly with the Boys & Girls club as we opted to put our focus on adults. We will still share the information with them regarding The Big Read on the local and national level. The study of departmentalization in Organization Theory of Public Management, we learn that the grouping of departments is a standard in much larger organizations. This can have downsides as it can lead to control and proper coordination. (p.31). A journal article about departmentalization explains how a study they completed on two organizations utilizing this concept had two different results. One organization utilized “interoccupational cooperation” and this proved to be an even better strategy to use with departmentalization (Price, 1968). Interoccupational cooperation includes an elaborate division of labor and cooperation among employees.

 

            TEAMWork and The Unity Center operation style correlates more similar to a flat organizational structure due to their small staff size. There is little bureaucracy and every employee handles a little bit of everything. The Journal of Knowledge Management supports this structure.  They produced an article on how effective this can be for a company. This can open the doors of communication and allows more knowledge to flow (Cortes, et al).

TEAMwork

TEAMWork has a smaller full-time staff to help promote and help manage events, but they do have a board of directors that houses many prominent members from the City of Muncie. They have five full-time staff members and volunteers.  Two employees work within event planning and managing the facility. These members would be able to help plan and facilitate and event. The other employees work with volunteers. They can be a huge asset in promoting our event as well as the board of directors. 

Unity Center

The Unity Center is a smaller and much newer organization. Their staff is more one level. They have only a couple full-time members. This organization may have the least amount of ability to promote or market our event, but we feel they have strong followers that can truly benefit from our primary purpose. They host an event every Monday morning at 10 am called Coffee Talk. They have agreed to allow us to use this their facility to share Fahrenheit 451 during this time. The Center will let us advertise prior to the event to raise awareness. Our hope is that regular attenders will invite their friends and family. We will make the event inviting to not make anyone feel overwhelmed.

Getting the crowd is the hard part. Once, we have the assistance of The Unity Center in bringing people together we can help provide them with a deeper understanding of our goals.  Nesbit stated (as cited in Deggs, Miller 2011) that,  “ educators of adults have a responsibility to raise important and challenging questions and to build upon their students’ lived experiences about how inequalities play out in communities, lives, and workplaces (Deggs, Miller 2011).  This is part of what the Unity is doing. They are giving us a chance to enhance this and bring more wealth to the table for these individuals.

Reflection

            A highlight of our project is the collaboration between our group and The Unity Center to host our workshop. It is a privilege that they are allowing us to “take over” a regularly scheduled Coffee Talk event to interact with their usual attendees, in addition to being open to us marketing to outsiders to join the event. Only one member of our group was familiar with both TEAMwork and The Unity Center, so it has been a great learning opportunity for the other two of us to learn more and become involved with these community organizations.

            While completing this assignment, we spoke in class concerning the paper and most of the communication surrounding the paper was via email. We split the paper into sections, and each member completed her section while looking over the previous members’ work to edit. Because we all have extremely different and busy schedules getting an early start was helpful. This allowed for us to spend the time needed on our individual portion while balancing other classes, work and other unexpected demands. Overall, communication has been key. Early communication with our community organizations and within our group has kept us confident and looking forward to the next step in the process.

References

Deggs, David, and Michael Miller. "Developing Community Expectations: The Critical Role of

Adult Educators." Adult Learning 2011: 25-30. Print.

Boys & Girls Club of Muncie. Boys & Girls of Muncie. 2015. http://www.bgcmuncie.org. 15 September 2015.
Enrique C., Patrocinio Z., Eva P., (2007) "Organizational structure features supporting knowledge management processes", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 11 Iss: 4, pp.45 - 57

Price. J, (1968). The impact of departmentalization on interoccupational cooperation. Human Organizaion, 27(4), 362-368. Retrieved from http://sfaajournals.net/doi/pdf/10.17730/humo.27.4.k15n635484747926
 

TEAMwork. TEAMwork for Quality Living. 2015. http://teamworkql.org. 15 September 2015.

Tomkins, Jonathan. (2005). Organization theory and public management. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.

Unity Center. muncieunitycenter.org. 2015. 15 September 2015.

 

 

Names of the Muncie organizations which can support the Big Read		Organizational structure and Management features of these organizations	Main ideas of the organization/management theories which reflect the features of Muncie organizations.	Action: How can we utilize Muncie organizations to support the Big Read based on the features of their organization structure/their management features?
11	Boys and Girls Club	This organization has just been reorganized. It has always had a board, executive director, assistant director, office assistant, and various staff to run the different rooms in the building. All the facility staff answers to the board of directors, but employees are to go through a certain “chain of command like a gym staff person should go to the assistant director before the executive director.	Organizational culture and Leadership Theory- This organization is very established and has particular roles for each employee. This way each employee can succeed at their job. Rational Goal Model-The executive director is very focused on bettering the organization by giving specific goals and duties.	One aspect of the Boys and Girls Club that would be helpful in support of the Big Read is the organization of the culture. Because each particular role is very defined, it makes it easier for us to approach them with our workshop proposal, instead of being passed from person to person, because no one is sure who makes the decision to promote events like the Big Read.
2	TEAMwork	TEAMwork has built itself up and maintained staff. They have the basic structure of board of directors, then employees called “circles coaches.”	Human Resources Theory-TEAMwork works hard to better the community inside and outside their organization.	TEAMwork’s desire to better both its members and the outside community can be used to first introduce the Big Read event to its members, and then they in turn will support the following events to the community, so the Big Read is continuously supported.
3	The Unity Center	The Unity Center is still building. Being the youngest of all the organizations they are building their board and only have two full time employees and several volunteer staff.	Human Resources Theory-The Unity Center not only works to better the community, but their employees by giving them opportunities to try new programs and create their own events.	Because the Unity Center is still new, and its organization evolving, we have the opportunity to influence the structure. If our workshop is well-received, they can see that this type of programming may be continued in the future, and at the same time may draw more participants to later Big Read events.