Grace Place Meals Reflection Essay
Grace Place is a home for women, both mothers and those on their own, to stay at when they have nowhere else to go; it is located just down the street from both my house and the high school I graduated from. Grace Place lets women stay for up to a year at no cost while they try to get back on their feet. Because they do all of this with their own money and are non-profit, I thought it would be nice to cook them dinner once a month to take some of the burden off of the workers. Since it is so close to my high school I wanted to get some of the girls there involved as well. I asked my cousin, her friend, and a couple other girls I thought would be interested in and good for the project if they would like to do it, and chose one of the seniors to be the project “head”. She was in charge of getting the girls together for a meeting, distributing the shopping duty, and sending out reminders before meetings and meal dates. The girls meet before school once a month and plan a meal to make and a date that works for the majority (if not all) of the girls; Abbey (the project head) then confirms with Grace Place and myself that the date is okay and then on that date we all meet at my house to cook. In addition to being able to give back to my community and support a really great organization through this project, I feel like I am teaching the girls in this group really valuable skills. All through high school I saw and heard about my friends basically living on snacks, fast food, and TV dinners. Both finding healthy meals to make and eating with my family has been really important in my life and it is disappointing to see that other people don’t place the same importance on it. The girls work really hard to plan well-balanced, healthy meals and to distribute the workload evenly.
I chose to start this service project because I wanted to help out a great organization that exists in my community while teaching students at my former high school valuable skills that they will use for the rest of their lives. In addition to teaching the girls some good skills, I learned a lot from them as well. This experience was similar to a program I was in my senior year of high school. It was called the LAUNCH program, and each student was asked to design their own project. In that program, I focused more on my artistic skills but again on working with others by promoting a walk for my cousin’s wife who passed away from cancer a few years ago. Grace Place was similar in that I came up with the project on my own, facilitated it, and again worked with others and on improving my communication skills. Grace Place will help me with future projects because I hope to use my Fine Arts degree to become a photographer; if I succeed, I would be in charge of my own schedule and projects and occasionally have to work with others (with an assistant or a client), much like with this project.
Since there are 7 of us working together in a small space, we need to work well together to avoid getting in each other’s way and make sure we don’t keep others from getting tasks done. Effective communication was really important since there were different groups that needed to be involved in each meal: the group, Grace Place, Mrs. Keith, and myself. Because so many different people were involved, there was a wide array of problems that could come up that I, as the leader, would have to deal with. One of the biggest problems in the beginning was contacting Grace Place. I found out later that they were switching who was in charge of the house and it took longer than they had expected, which interfered with our communication with them. The other minor problem I ran into was that the girls would occasionally forget to make sure the meal was well-balanced and would leave out vegetables or fruit; they also relied on brownies a little too much for dessert since it is such an easy bake, but luckily we were able to get away from that towards the end of the year. The last thing that was a slight problem, but didn’t happen often at all, was making sure we got the meal to Grace Place on time. We had a half hour window when the residents wanted to eat dinner, and the only time that we had trouble with was when we made our “Thanksgiving” meal, and the turkey took about 45 minutes longer than we expected it to. We always plan to have the meal ready as early as possible in case we run into any problems, so even though the turkey took almost an hour longer to cook than we thought, we were only about 15 minutes late to deliver the meal.
The girls learned how to work together as a group; how to efficiently distribute tasks, combine everyone’s ideas, respect each other’s opinions, and take responsibility. After this project, I feel that all of the girls have a much better understanding of how to plan and make a well-balanced meal. Some of them had honestly never used an oven before they were involved in this project and now each of them have the capability to make a full meal on their own. Even though the girls chose not to have Key Club reimburse them for the money they spent on the meals, they still stayed within a couple dollars of the budget every time, even for the “Thanksgiving” meal. I was really impressed with their commitment to the project and how willing they were to give both their time and money to the cause.
What helped me to be an effective leader of this project was my love of cooking and being able to help the girls in the kitchen and plan healthy meals, as well as my previous experience as a sophomore retreat leader that helped me to effectively manage, lead and work with this great group of girls. The other thing that really helped was having such a wonderful group that was really committed to the project and open to the experience and all the learning it entailed. What I was really hoping to achieve with this project, besides providing a great organization with meals, is teaching the girls the importance of eating healthy and spending time together shopping and making a meal. I think what the girls hadn’t realized is how simple and easy it is once you sit down and make a plan. I really enjoyed seeing how the girls got more enthusiastic as the project went on, asking their families for recipes and ideas for the meals.
Towards the beginning of the project, I decided to change the way I disseminated this particular endeavor to a recipe book, instead of a scrapbook. I felt it made more sense with the project and I would be able to reach a wider audience with it. I knew I wanted to give a paper copy to Grace Place so that they could recreate some of their favorite meals we made for them. I also wanted to put the recipes on Grace Place’s website so residents who had passed through and moved out would also have access to them. Maura, one of the live-in leaders at the house, said she would love to have us do that but unfortunately they are locked out of their website at this point due to technical issues. We talked for a while and she said if I could put them on a flash drive for her, she would keep it and upload the recipes for me as soon as she was able.
I was really happy with how this project turned out. I’m beyond impressed with the group of girls and their commitment level. I feel that as a group, we grew closer throughout the course of working together and found the best ways to communicate. We also experienced bad communication with Grace Place, the effects of it and how to deal with it. I feel that the girls learned a lot, about working together, making healthier choices, taking charge, and doing an experience they haven’t participated in before. This experience was a really great one and the knowledge that I gained from it will benefit me in the future. I think it would be really great if more people or groups took the initiative to make meals for places in their community as well. It shows appreciation for what the organization does and also helps to build relationships. A project like Grace Place is really so simple, but has great results.
Through this project, I learned how to better communicate and work effectively with others. I think I have always been good working with others, but I have never really tried to manage a larger group of people, especially a group of people all aged within a couple years of myself. We were also able to find more efficient ways to work together and maneuver around the kitchen as the project progressed. We found ways to work well together and always managed to make a plan at the beginning of the meal to make sure that all of the tasks got done and all of the food was hot and ready to go when it was time to deliver the food. I also think that going through all of the trouble communicating with Grace Place in the beginning of the project helped me to learn how to deal with it effectively and work around complications.
I intended to read two books on leadership theories, but one of the ones I wanted to read (Successful Community Leadership) was not able to be checked out from the library like I had planned, so I ended up only reading Insights on Leadership. Even though I only read one of the books I was planning on, there were so many contributors and different ways of looking at the same idea that I felt I obtained plenty of information. In the foreword of the book, there was an example comparing servant-leadership to managing a farm; many people cram in school for tests, quizzes, etc. and may receive a degree, but not necessarily an education—you can’t cram on a farm. You can’t make up for not planting seeds in the earlier months by sowing and reaping more when it’s time to harvest; it just won’t happen. The example then goes on to say that just about every part of life—marriage, a family, businesses—is like a farm, not school. Therefore, servant-leadership, being like a farm, is relevant in pretty much every aspect of our lives. One of the quotes from the book that I feel hits the nail on the head when it comes to describing servant-leadership is by Robert Greenleaf (a constant reference throughout the book), and he said:
The servant leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer…more likely themselves to become servants? I feel that this outcome should be the goal for any leader: to inspire the group they are leading to continue working on, even when they are on their own and have no one right by them, leading them the entire way.
There were also two lists present in the book that I made note of and wanted to keep in mind throughout my time working on this project, and evaluate myself against once it was over. The first was ten characteristics of a servant leader, which was extracted from researching Greenleaf’s writings. The list contained the following characteristics: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of the people, and building community. My goal for myself was to have understood and employed at least 50% of these characteristics throughout my project. Listening, according to Greenleaf, is also coupled with reflection; I think this is one of the characteristics that I noticed the most throughout Grace Place. I find it almost inevitable when you are working with a group; you have to listen to everyone in the group, not just the leader, to get the work done and come up with an effective plan of how to do it. I also believe that empathy was a part of this project—not just by me, but by the other girls as well. When someone couldn’t make it, no one was angry at them for not coming and leaving more work for the rest of the group because we all understand that things come up sometimes, whether with family or school, because all of the girls (myself included) are in school and trying to figure out how to balance all the aspects of our life. I believe I was very aware, at all times, of what was going on in the project. Whether it was having difficulty finding a date, trying to work within our budget, cooking things that the girls never had before, or the difficulty in getting in touch with Grace Place, I was always aware of the situation because of the communication I had with the different parts of the group (Mrs. Keith at McAuley, Abbey who communicated with the rest of the girls, and the various people at Grace Place). Persuasion was a little necessary sometimes, although not too much, when the girls would plan a meal that either didn’t have a good variety of all the food groups or was getting a little repetitive—no matter how easy or simple it was, I wanted to try and keep from repeating things over and over. We were only delivering a meal once a month, and I felt that since it really wasn’t that often the least we could do was find something new each time and not get stuck in a rut…especially with desserts! The girls wanted to make brownies or cookies a lot, and I tried to dissuade them from this a little bit. Even if it was just a boxed mix for lemon bars or making the cupcakes mini instead of full-sized, I wanted to do something different. The biggest characteristic is building community; I think my whole project was based around this. Building community within McAuley, within different grades, and within the surrounding areas of the girls’ school. Making them aware of what was going on literally two houses down from the driveway they pull into every day of the week. I feel like I succeeded in this because the girls by the end told me they looked forward to coming and making the meal, and getting to deliver it to Grace Place and see everyone there when they dropped the food off.
The second list was much more extensive, entitled “Values Manifesto for Tough-Minded Servant-Leaders” and consists of 37 values that Joe Batten believes leaders practice every day. I won’t include the entire list here, but the ones I feel are most important for a leader to possess (even though they are all important) and the ones I tried hardest to keep throughout the time of this project—and that I will hopefully remember to keep for every other leading experience I have. The values I most believe in from this list are: warmth, consistency, flexibility, involvement, tolerance of mistakes, time, development of people, enjoyment of life, enjoyment of work, management by example and accountability. Without these values in particular, I don’t think the Grace Place project would have been as successful as it was.
In this project, I honestly felt like I was just a part of the group. Yes, I made sure that we had a date scheduled, a meeting took place, there was someone to do the shopping, and we had a well-balanced meal, but once we all got together to cook I didn’t feel like I—or anyone else—took over. We all worked together and helped each other out. No one needed to be in charge, and everyone was able to give their input when they had an idea or a piece of advice in an area no one else knew about. I believe that everyone felt extremely comfortable putting their ideas and advice out for the group to hear and no one was ever shot down or their ideas discarded. It was a pretty ideal group situation, and I’m glad that it worked out that way and was as harmonious as it was.
The artifact I chose to include with this project was the recipe book of all the meals we made. I feel it is a culmination of all the work we did over the year and showcases how effective (or ineffective) we were at our goal of planning well balanced, healthy meals for the residents. In the recipe book, you can see what meals we made, how to make the main dish, and what side dishes and desserts we chose to go along with it. By being able to see all of this, it is easy to pick out the months that we had very well-balanced meals, and those where we may have forgotten fruit or vegetables. It also allows us to compare what we made each month and see if we repeated a specific item (especially dessert) too often. Looking at this will help us plan and know what to work on for next year, when the project continues.
Grace Place is a home for women, both mothers and those on their own, to stay at when they have nowhere else to go; it is located just down the street from both my house and the high school I graduated from. Grace Place lets women stay for up to a year at no cost while they try to get back on their feet. Because they do all of this with their own money and are non-profit, I thought it would be nice to cook them dinner once a month to take some of the burden off of the workers. Since it is so close to my high school I wanted to get some of the girls there involved as well. I asked my cousin, her friend, and a couple other girls I thought would be interested in and good for the project if they would like to do it, and chose one of the seniors to be the project “head”. She was in charge of getting the girls together for a meeting, distributing the shopping duty, and sending out reminders before meetings and meal dates. The girls meet before school once a month and plan a meal to make and a date that works for the majority (if not all) of the girls; Abbey (the project head) then confirms with Grace Place and myself that the date is okay and then on that date we all meet at my house to cook. In addition to being able to give back to my community and support a really great organization through this project, I feel like I am teaching the girls in this group really valuable skills. All through high school I saw and heard about my friends basically living on snacks, fast food, and TV dinners. Both finding healthy meals to make and eating with my family has been really important in my life and it is disappointing to see that other people don’t place the same importance on it. The girls work really hard to plan well-balanced, healthy meals and to distribute the workload evenly.
I chose to start this service project because I wanted to help out a great organization that exists in my community while teaching students at my former high school valuable skills that they will use for the rest of their lives. In addition to teaching the girls some good skills, I learned a lot from them as well. This experience was similar to a program I was in my senior year of high school. It was called the LAUNCH program, and each student was asked to design their own project. In that program, I focused more on my artistic skills but again on working with others by promoting a walk for my cousin’s wife who passed away from cancer a few years ago. Grace Place was similar in that I came up with the project on my own, facilitated it, and again worked with others and on improving my communication skills. Grace Place will help me with future projects because I hope to use my Fine Arts degree to become a photographer; if I succeed, I would be in charge of my own schedule and projects and occasionally have to work with others (with an assistant or a client), much like with this project.
Since there are 7 of us working together in a small space, we need to work well together to avoid getting in each other’s way and make sure we don’t keep others from getting tasks done. Effective communication was really important since there were different groups that needed to be involved in each meal: the group, Grace Place, Mrs. Keith, and myself. Because so many different people were involved, there was a wide array of problems that could come up that I, as the leader, would have to deal with. One of the biggest problems in the beginning was contacting Grace Place. I found out later that they were switching who was in charge of the house and it took longer than they had expected, which interfered with our communication with them. The other minor problem I ran into was that the girls would occasionally forget to make sure the meal was well-balanced and would leave out vegetables or fruit; they also relied on brownies a little too much for dessert since it is such an easy bake, but luckily we were able to get away from that towards the end of the year. The last thing that was a slight problem, but didn’t happen often at all, was making sure we got the meal to Grace Place on time. We had a half hour window when the residents wanted to eat dinner, and the only time that we had trouble with was when we made our “Thanksgiving” meal, and the turkey took about 45 minutes longer than we expected it to. We always plan to have the meal ready as early as possible in case we run into any problems, so even though the turkey took almost an hour longer to cook than we thought, we were only about 15 minutes late to deliver the meal.
The girls learned how to work together as a group; how to efficiently distribute tasks, combine everyone’s ideas, respect each other’s opinions, and take responsibility. After this project, I feel that all of the girls have a much better understanding of how to plan and make a well-balanced meal. Some of them had honestly never used an oven before they were involved in this project and now each of them have the capability to make a full meal on their own. Even though the girls chose not to have Key Club reimburse them for the money they spent on the meals, they still stayed within a couple dollars of the budget every time, even for the “Thanksgiving” meal. I was really impressed with their commitment to the project and how willing they were to give both their time and money to the cause.
What helped me to be an effective leader of this project was my love of cooking and being able to help the girls in the kitchen and plan healthy meals, as well as my previous experience as a sophomore retreat leader that helped me to effectively manage, lead and work with this great group of girls. The other thing that really helped was having such a wonderful group that was really committed to the project and open to the experience and all the learning it entailed. What I was really hoping to achieve with this project, besides providing a great organization with meals, is teaching the girls the importance of eating healthy and spending time together shopping and making a meal. I think what the girls hadn’t realized is how simple and easy it is once you sit down and make a plan. I really enjoyed seeing how the girls got more enthusiastic as the project went on, asking their families for recipes and ideas for the meals.
Towards the beginning of the project, I decided to change the way I disseminated this particular endeavor to a recipe book, instead of a scrapbook. I felt it made more sense with the project and I would be able to reach a wider audience with it. I knew I wanted to give a paper copy to Grace Place so that they could recreate some of their favorite meals we made for them. I also wanted to put the recipes on Grace Place’s website so residents who had passed through and moved out would also have access to them. Maura, one of the live-in leaders at the house, said she would love to have us do that but unfortunately they are locked out of their website at this point due to technical issues. We talked for a while and she said if I could put them on a flash drive for her, she would keep it and upload the recipes for me as soon as she was able.
I was really happy with how this project turned out. I’m beyond impressed with the group of girls and their commitment level. I feel that as a group, we grew closer throughout the course of working together and found the best ways to communicate. We also experienced bad communication with Grace Place, the effects of it and how to deal with it. I feel that the girls learned a lot, about working together, making healthier choices, taking charge, and doing an experience they haven’t participated in before. This experience was a really great one and the knowledge that I gained from it will benefit me in the future. I think it would be really great if more people or groups took the initiative to make meals for places in their community as well. It shows appreciation for what the organization does and also helps to build relationships. A project like Grace Place is really so simple, but has great results.
Through this project, I learned how to better communicate and work effectively with others. I think I have always been good working with others, but I have never really tried to manage a larger group of people, especially a group of people all aged within a couple years of myself. We were also able to find more efficient ways to work together and maneuver around the kitchen as the project progressed. We found ways to work well together and always managed to make a plan at the beginning of the meal to make sure that all of the tasks got done and all of the food was hot and ready to go when it was time to deliver the food. I also think that going through all of the trouble communicating with Grace Place in the beginning of the project helped me to learn how to deal with it effectively and work around complications.
I intended to read two books on leadership theories, but one of the ones I wanted to read (Successful Community Leadership) was not able to be checked out from the library like I had planned, so I ended up only reading Insights on Leadership. Even though I only read one of the books I was planning on, there were so many contributors and different ways of looking at the same idea that I felt I obtained plenty of information. In the foreword of the book, there was an example comparing servant-leadership to managing a farm; many people cram in school for tests, quizzes, etc. and may receive a degree, but not necessarily an education—you can’t cram on a farm. You can’t make up for not planting seeds in the earlier months by sowing and reaping more when it’s time to harvest; it just won’t happen. The example then goes on to say that just about every part of life—marriage, a family, businesses—is like a farm, not school. Therefore, servant-leadership, being like a farm, is relevant in pretty much every aspect of our lives. One of the quotes from the book that I feel hits the nail on the head when it comes to describing servant-leadership is by Robert Greenleaf (a constant reference throughout the book), and he said:
The servant leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer…more likely themselves to become servants? I feel that this outcome should be the goal for any leader: to inspire the group they are leading to continue working on, even when they are on their own and have no one right by them, leading them the entire way.
There were also two lists present in the book that I made note of and wanted to keep in mind throughout my time working on this project, and evaluate myself against once it was over. The first was ten characteristics of a servant leader, which was extracted from researching Greenleaf’s writings. The list contained the following characteristics: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of the people, and building community. My goal for myself was to have understood and employed at least 50% of these characteristics throughout my project. Listening, according to Greenleaf, is also coupled with reflection; I think this is one of the characteristics that I noticed the most throughout Grace Place. I find it almost inevitable when you are working with a group; you have to listen to everyone in the group, not just the leader, to get the work done and come up with an effective plan of how to do it. I also believe that empathy was a part of this project—not just by me, but by the other girls as well. When someone couldn’t make it, no one was angry at them for not coming and leaving more work for the rest of the group because we all understand that things come up sometimes, whether with family or school, because all of the girls (myself included) are in school and trying to figure out how to balance all the aspects of our life. I believe I was very aware, at all times, of what was going on in the project. Whether it was having difficulty finding a date, trying to work within our budget, cooking things that the girls never had before, or the difficulty in getting in touch with Grace Place, I was always aware of the situation because of the communication I had with the different parts of the group (Mrs. Keith at McAuley, Abbey who communicated with the rest of the girls, and the various people at Grace Place). Persuasion was a little necessary sometimes, although not too much, when the girls would plan a meal that either didn’t have a good variety of all the food groups or was getting a little repetitive—no matter how easy or simple it was, I wanted to try and keep from repeating things over and over. We were only delivering a meal once a month, and I felt that since it really wasn’t that often the least we could do was find something new each time and not get stuck in a rut…especially with desserts! The girls wanted to make brownies or cookies a lot, and I tried to dissuade them from this a little bit. Even if it was just a boxed mix for lemon bars or making the cupcakes mini instead of full-sized, I wanted to do something different. The biggest characteristic is building community; I think my whole project was based around this. Building community within McAuley, within different grades, and within the surrounding areas of the girls’ school. Making them aware of what was going on literally two houses down from the driveway they pull into every day of the week. I feel like I succeeded in this because the girls by the end told me they looked forward to coming and making the meal, and getting to deliver it to Grace Place and see everyone there when they dropped the food off.
The second list was much more extensive, entitled “Values Manifesto for Tough-Minded Servant-Leaders” and consists of 37 values that Joe Batten believes leaders practice every day. I won’t include the entire list here, but the ones I feel are most important for a leader to possess (even though they are all important) and the ones I tried hardest to keep throughout the time of this project—and that I will hopefully remember to keep for every other leading experience I have. The values I most believe in from this list are: warmth, consistency, flexibility, involvement, tolerance of mistakes, time, development of people, enjoyment of life, enjoyment of work, management by example and accountability. Without these values in particular, I don’t think the Grace Place project would have been as successful as it was.
In this project, I honestly felt like I was just a part of the group. Yes, I made sure that we had a date scheduled, a meeting took place, there was someone to do the shopping, and we had a well-balanced meal, but once we all got together to cook I didn’t feel like I—or anyone else—took over. We all worked together and helped each other out. No one needed to be in charge, and everyone was able to give their input when they had an idea or a piece of advice in an area no one else knew about. I believe that everyone felt extremely comfortable putting their ideas and advice out for the group to hear and no one was ever shot down or their ideas discarded. It was a pretty ideal group situation, and I’m glad that it worked out that way and was as harmonious as it was.
The artifact I chose to include with this project was the recipe book of all the meals we made. I feel it is a culmination of all the work we did over the year and showcases how effective (or ineffective) we were at our goal of planning well balanced, healthy meals for the residents. In the recipe book, you can see what meals we made, how to make the main dish, and what side dishes and desserts we chose to go along with it. By being able to see all of this, it is easy to pick out the months that we had very well-balanced meals, and those where we may have forgotten fruit or vegetables. It also allows us to compare what we made each month and see if we repeated a specific item (especially dessert) too often. Looking at this will help us plan and know what to work on for next year, when the project continues.