During the Spring semester of my freshman year, I attended a weekend retreat called the PossePlus Retreat, which gathered students, faculty, staff, and administrators from Wesleyan University to talk about how we could bring different groups together on campus to engage with one another. At the end of the retreat, we met in smaller groups and were tasked with developing a solid plan or event that we could organize on campus to do just that. During this conversation, I recalled an event that I attended while at community college called Common Grounds, a simple event with a play on words where students, faculty, and staff would meet for some coffee/tea and use some icebreakers to get to know each other. I suggested that we implement something similar at Wesleyan. I thought this type of event would succeed due to the small amount of money and minimal it required. Who wouldn’t want free coffee, tea, and donuts?
The Vice President for Equity & Inclusion at Wesleyan was in my breakout group and suggested that we form an official committee that consisted of himself, another staff member, and a handful of other students.
During our first meeting, we had assigned roles to each member of the committee to either research potential locations, create marketing posters, and come up with ice breakers. We also settled on our committee’s mission: Connecting Our Campus Through Dialogue. Our hope with this mission was to use Common Grounds as a recurring event to bring students, faculty, staff, and administrators from various groups and backgrounds together to engage in conversations to break down any misconceptions members of groups may have of each other, as well as find some commonalities amongst the various participants. My personal hope for this project was to create a space to break down any barriers that may exist between the student veteran and traditional student populations on campus and to allow students to get to know our campus’ faculty and administrators on a more personal level outside of the classroom.
We agreed that we were going to have our event take place at Espwesso, a student-run café on campus, to support an already established student institution on campus. They would be able to provide coffee and tea, and it is a space that is already known amongst the student body for its comfortable vibe. We also decided to hold the event during common hour, a time where there are no classes held on campus and hoped that offering free coffee and tea would also be enticing to students who needed to recharge before they headed to another class.
Throughout the event we had about 20-25 students and staff attend, with about 15 staying for the entire length. While we as a committee thought that this was a decent turnout for a first event, I was disappointed that we were only able to pull in people that we already knew.
If I were to organize an event like this again, I would either plan for the event to be outside of the common hour or would have to provide more substantial food options because it is a timeslot that most of the student body uses to grab lunch with friends. I would also try to co-sponsor the event with at least one other student group on campus to have a greater turnout of students that were outside of the pool of people we already knew.
