"As part of the mission committee of Professor Buinicki’s ENGL 296 class, the job of my group was to work with the values and issues that our class had chosen for this semester. We had to use these ideas and effectively portray them in a way that would really highlight the kinds of non-profits our class is interested in helping. All of us in the mission committee agreed we wanted a creative way to express our mission without simply listing the values. At the very beginning of our discussion on values, the class heartily agreed on “empathy” as a strong idea we wanted to hold onto. I think that this value is an overarching theme of the types of issues and values our class holds, and so the mission committee decided to begin the statement with “through the promotion of empathy” which underlines the main goal of our cause.
Since we wanted to work with the most prominent issues of our area-- Porter County, IN-- we thought that it would be important to include that in our statement. Our goal as the mission committee was to accurately express our desire as a class to find organizations that are interested in healing and community for those struggling with mental health issues, homelessness and substance abuse.
Through writing and rewording the mission statement, we came to a few questions which we needed to ask the class. We had “mental health” as one of our issues, but through crafting the statement we were unsure if this was mental health in the broad sense of the word, or if it was in direct correlation with substance abuse and homelessness. Another question was if we wanted to explicitly say “healing through community” or “healing and community.” Even the smallest changes to diction and syntax can change the meaning, and so we wanted to make sure that our statement was reflective of exactly what our class is looking for in a non-profit. Personally, I found this to be a special aspect of being on the mission committee; by overlooking a word choice I potentially had the power to reject or overlook certain organizations solely because I used “and” instead of “through!” Overall, I think that as a committee we were able to take the agreed upon values and issues to create a cohesive and distinctive mission statement that the class could work with as we further discussed the questions we had. I am excited to see how the mission statement helps the class to find unique and empathetic organizations around our community!"
Miranda E. - Edison, NJ - Sophomore French and Global Service double major
