Creators: Leslie Gonzalez, Tatum Abadir, Emily Breen, & Lucy Brainard
For our class, Nonprofit Communications, we were assigned to work with a service-learning partner in the Boston area for the entirety of the semester. Our group of four was paired with Resilient Sisterhood Project (RSP), a local nonprofit organization that works to educate and empower women of African descent regarding common but rarely discussed diseases of the reproductive system that disproportionately affect them. We were tasked with creating a strategic communications plan for RSP to accomplish their SMART goal of recruiting 40 young black women to attend their event, “Remembering Our Foremothers in Medicine”, taking place on May 11, 2019.
The project was very rewarding for all of us involved because it created something tangible to give to a local nonprofit and we really enjoyed working with the staff at RSP. It was certainly helpful that the organization resides just down the road from Northeastern and we had a group member working regularly with RSP as an intern. The RSP staff were incredibly thoughtful, knowledgeable, and compelling in their work to bring awareness to healthcare disparities that disproportionately affect black women in the US and Boston specifically. They brought to the table several decades of experience and personal connections in the reproductive health field and around social justice in general. It was inspirational to see how passionate they were about the issue and to help them expand their audiences to bring awareness around these issues to a broader demographic. Additionally, we appreciated bringing together various lessons from class over the course of the semester and applying them to a real-world environment.
It was such a valuable experience to participate in this type of project-based service-learning which allowed us to work closely and collaboratively with our partner organization, RSP. Through developing a communications plan, consistently incorporating their input and strengths while also taking lessons learned in our class, we learned so much about how nonprofit communications happens on the ground. We also got the chance to provide a contribution to RSP that will set them up for the future and will hopefully create a lasting, sustainable impact by engaging more young people in their mission. However, this process didn’t come without challenges. It was difficult to work around so many schedules of our team members as well as the organization, especially because the organization is very limited in their staff capacity. We also found that the broadness of the topic and RSP’s mission was sometimes hard to narrow down into something we could make focus on in regards to our SMART goal. We were able to work through these challenges as a group by utilizing consistent communication and follow-up both between the group members as well as with RSP.
Through this process, we learned the importance of being flexible, especially when working within a group and collaborating with external organizations. We recognize the importance of specificity in creating a communications plan for such a small organization with a broad mission. We were given so much valuable information about women’s reproductive health that we didn’t know before and understand the complexity of reproductive healthcare disparities as well as how it intersects with other social justice issues. Through our strategic communications plan, we are looking forward to seeing how this awareness spreads across our selected audiences on and off college campuses.