As a team, GBLA has taught us a lot about how much work goes into creating any kind of change. We initially thought it would be easy to start a conversation about gender, and to get our peers to care as much as we did. We learned that it was about way more than our own interest. We had to be organized, we had to communicate with each other, and we had to make time for our project in our busy schedules. We also had to keep up enthusiasm, and make sure we were taking care of big and little details.
Our strengths as a team:
We really care about teaching our community why gender stereotypes hurt all of us, and that talking about it and calling out limitations matters.
Working together
Meeting deadlines
Leading discussions and promoting our campaign. We visited all the classes in our school to promote our event, and were proud of ourselves for joining together to show other students why they should care to.
A group of individual leaders--each of us led a discussion with students who attended our first event, and even though it was intimidating, it was really sucessful. We learned that our peers do respect us, want to listen, and fully joined the conversation. We learned that it's not scary to bring people together, and that our voices are strong. We learned that we are good getting people talking and keeping them on point.
We got a big conversation going around our school about gender roles. That is really exciting.
Lessons we learned for next year:
Time management is really important. All of us are in our junior year, and it was really hard to balance all of our other commitments with GBLA.
Communication-figuring out a way for all of us to stay on the same page when we are not physically at a meeting. Email didn't work, but Snapchat group texts did.
Responsibility-making sure that if you sign up to complete a task, you know that the team relies on you to do that.
That even fun campaigns take a lot of work to organize. A project is more than an idea--execution is everything.
It would be really great if GBLA was a class, or had an opportunity to meet more than once a week. We always felt like we didn't have enough time to get everything done. Maybe next year we could meet twice a week, or partner with another club.