Thursday, October 26, 2006

SEA Perspective


So this is the first time I have ever actually written on a blog and I am not entirely sure what I think about it yet. As many of the people reading this know I was and sort of still are a member of SEA for four years or so. I am reading this business strategy book for fun right now and it made me reevaluate some of the different things that I did in college with SEA. Here is a list of all the things that I did with SEA for the four years or so I was in it.

1. Protested Secretary of Interior Gail Norton and had Charles Benjamin give a rebuttal speech.
2. Dorm Carpet Recycling (messy)
3. Craft work (still going strong)
4. 04 political tabling (Boyda lost but not a bad time)
5. KSU Coalition for Peace (yeah that was my bad)
6. Dorm Recycling (i had this my freshman year)
7. Local Buyers Guide
8. The time we gave out hemp ribbons in exchange for people not driving to school.
9. Speakers: Svaty, Benjamin, Buffalo, Wind People, Global Exchange Bloke,
10. Camping & Canoeing
11. Sherow Campaigning (that was really good up until the end)
12. Greek House recycling (not really sure what happened)
13. Aggieville Recycling
14. In-Stadium Recycling
15. TailGate Recycling
16. Candidate Forum in '04 (same night as Dylan, bad turnout)
17. Countless Voter Registration
18. Tuttle Creek Clean Up
19. Sunset Zoo Clean Up (my dad is still mad at me for making him do that)
20. Curbside Recycling
21. Anti-Parking Garage
22. Manhattan/K-state Public Transportation

This is by no means a complete list but just what I came off the top of my head in 5 min. Some of them worked some of them never got off the ground. One thing that bothered me about them is that we kept on coming back to the same issues and it seems like we never learned from our mistakes. Each semester or year someone would mention dorm recycling and we would treat it like no one had ever tried this before. I don't really think that this is anyone persons fault, things just fall through the cracks. I'm not sure the best way to solve this; maybe take notes on the individual committee activities. Each week or month creating a time line with all of the different things that they did and all of the different people that they talked to. Imagine me advocating more structure. I love SEA and all of my friends that I met there but it would nice to see some things get all the way done. Hindsight is 20/20 right? Back to work for me.

1 comments:

Megan said...

I agree that we shouldn't keep trying things if they don't work. But at the same time it seems that we are re-trying things in a new way. Such as we are going to try and incorporate greek recycling with tailgate recycling, getting the greek houses to help recycling so we have more people and more support, hoping that will help and trying to push that the money will go to charity, i mean who doesn't love giving to charities? and with the anti-parking garage, we are going to go straight to the source, wefald himself and try to talk face-to-face with him, because that seems to be the best approach but we just didn't do it before. the local's buyers guide is on its way, it's in the process of being organized in a way we can conceptualize it so that we can go and start talking to businesses and create it. I think we did learn from our 'mistakes' with the aggieville recycling just because it is not feasible unless we want to run howie's out of business. And i think public transporation is still a possibility but it will be a lot of work and seems that it might not be able to happen until manhattan gets government funding. Well i would continue but i need to go to class.