Buzz Blog

As the Buzzing family grows, so does our travel budget.  It's important for us to have board members at every event to support the hard work of the student leaders that are in charge of the programs.  

This year, we not only have a new program in Pittsburgh, but also an exciting opportunity in Boston, and the possibility of presenting at a conference for campus leaders in Arkansas.  All of which will require putting a Buzzing board member in the air (we tried making Judah grow wings but it didn't quite work out).

In the past few years we have been very fortunate to be able to form some amazing partnerships and are starting to see our campuses take initiative with this as well.  For instance, our program at GW this past year formed alliances with both College Boxes and NIH Federal Credit Union that helped them increase their fundraising for Special Love.  Our new program at Pitt has some exciting things in the works for this year.

Six years ago, on September 14th, 2003, Buzzing for Change held its first program.  After that day many doubted if the successes we saw could be replicated.  Six years and ten events later I think we can answer that doubt with a resounding "yes we can." 

After reading this post (and the one related to it) I was inspired.  Not really by what was said (well, not for Buzzing for Change purposes) but for the sentiment where Alex says "Dare to be great.  Together."

The new school year is about to begin for most of our programs, and TB4CF has gotten geared up as well.  We are in the final stages of developing our three year strategic plan, we finally finished our year end accounting (and raised nearly $30,000 for children living with cancer), recruited new people for our team and spent significant time revising and updating our program manual.

Many of you may have been wondering where we've been all summer. Let us first apologize that this post did not come earlier in the summer. For those of you that are in college, work for an educational institution or remember back when you went to college - the summer is down time.

We, like our students, put in a lot of work throughout the academic year and spend the summer re-charging. We take time to review the past year, our successes and what we need to improve upon. We look at our numbers - our programs, participants and dollars raised and figure out what that means for us.

Last week, I was at an awards dinner and someone said in their speech:

"If you strive for perfection, you will achieve greatness"

While I doubt this is an original quote, it has resonated with me and I think it applies to the three B4C programs that were held in April.  Each had its unique challenges, but the students rose to meet them, and often surpassed our expectations.

As you may know, Buzzing for Change is run entirely by volunteers, which means that everyone on our Team has a day job.  I work for Hillel at Temple University where I advise Jewish students on Temple's campus.  At my job we often talk, as I am sure other campus religious groups do, about a students growth.  We use the metaphor of them be

As a lot of the prior blog posts have pointed out, we want people to tell their story.  One of the ways I tell my story is through song; no, not me singing, but through finding inspiration in other's lyrics.  In these hectic weeks of our events, I find that the following songs give me inspiration to continue and push on no mater how tired / frustrated / exhausted I am.  Please share your B4

In our blog post last week we rolled out our social media standards, and tomorrow we will be putting them to good use.  Tomorrow will be the 6th Buzzing for Change event at GW and we'll be bringing it all to you, no matter where you are!  We will be posting on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr throughout the event.  If you are there, make sure to post about your experience as it happens!