Climate Action Plan Communications Coordinator
I was hired between March 2012 and August 2012 for a temporary position as the University's communications coordinator to follow our Climate Action Plan. The UW has had a climate policy for several years, and recently a group of Evans School of Public Affairs students developed a plan to tackle one side of the carbon reduction plan: behavior change. Already the UW has taken action to reduce emissions through technology and offsets, but behavior is a key component. To change behaviors, I was hired to implement a communications strategy, experiment with various methods, and ultimately write recommendations for best practices towards achieving our Climate Action Plan with regards to behavior change in students, staff, and faculty.
High Expectations
I have always excelled at giving myself high expectations. My expectations have acted both as the impetus for my success and a detriment to my progress. In the CAP Communications role I set out to lower carbon emissions in over 15 different categories in the short time of 5 months. For example I wanted to start a campaign to encourage faculty to travel via plane less. I was able to accomplish a great amount of my goals because of these expectations and that determination helped me encourage and motivate others in my office to help towards achieving these goals. At the same time, these high expectations taught me the importance of seeking balance and accepting failure. While high expectations are fantastic to push yourself toward greater accomplishment, one must accept that these expectations cannot always be met in the midst of realities. I hope to continue approaching projects with high expectations, but with a willingness to accept struggles with dignity.
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Emotional and Stress Management
As I prepared to leave the United States for my next journey to South Africa, the final weeks of my CAP communications position were highly stressful. At one point I completely broke down at the end of one day, struggling to accomplish my goals with the looming responsibilities of my departure. Amidst this emotional breakdown I learned the importance of managing my emotions and stress. I had an open conversation with my boss about how to effectively balance my time so that I could also deal with these stresses. One approach I took to help me focus my energies was a multicolored calendar with one color highlighting the main task for a day, and another color highlighting the secondary tasks. This enabled me to focus on the most important task each day rather than shuffling my focus and increasing my stress. Not only did this improve my stress level, but allowed me to accomplish more than I had expected in the final two weeks. I now use this process of daily goal setting every day along with meditations, active reflection, and time in nature to assess my stresses and find peace amidst a busy world.
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Assess Strengths and Weaknesses in a Team
In my position as CAP Communications Coordinator I was in charge of working with a team of project managers, sustainability experts, graphic designers, and university administrators to best plan out carbon reduction strategies. With the help of a workshop on personalities from the Vice President of my office, I was encouraged to approach my group work with assessment and utilization of strengths. Specifically I worked extensively with a graphic designer in my office who had very different work approaches from myself. I am very planning oriented and work at certain times. My co-workers worked best at odd hours and in spurts of creative energy. At times this was challenging, but I found out how to best work with this by providing hard deadlines and consistently checking in with my co-worker to make sure that we could meet our goals and that he was comfortably able to craft his designs. With new projects in other groups I have learned the importance of asking folks to state their strengths and weaknesses openly to start our working relationship off with a strong foundation of understanding.
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Diversity in Leadership
When I started the role of CAP Communications Coordinator, I sought to communicate in relevant ways to different UW communities. For example with an increasingly diverse campus of international students I researched methods of communications that would cross language barriers and started work on a sustainability brand. Additionally I sought voices in my work that were diverse. In our branding workshops we included students and staff from a variety of departments and backgrounds to best assess what sustainability brand we wanted to communicate as UW. Included diverse perspectives helped develop an effective brand which is incorporated in sustainability initiatives across campus, including Earth Day marketing. These efforts to include diversity proved critical, and as I continue in my undergraduate career I always seek diversity, pulling in unheard voices, and listening to points of view I may not automatically know.
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