Earlier this month, I participated in Pioneer Weekend, a social innovation competition at Grinnell College. Our team, Chai Tea Latte, won third place with our proposal that combines recycling and bringing the community together by creating art.

While Pioneer Weekend is mostly a pitch competition that guides students through brainstorming projects and considering issues such as feasibility and partnerships, it has led me to ponder more on practical aspects of community work. One of the things I’ve always remembered from Ryan, Director of Civic Engagement at Grinnell College, is that college students have no institutional memory. Every other year, students come up with ideas and work with community members to get started but end up in vain due to academic load or graduation. While community members have always been accommodating, this is not nice in the long run, he said.

That’s why feasibility and sustainability are the keys to community-based projects. In this project, we discussed how to launch the project step by step, from small projects to increase publicity, to large-scale projects that involve more community members. We also considered ways to make this effort sustainable.

We are discussing with collaborators for a small, kick-off community art project. Maybe you’ll see a Christmas tree made of plastic cups, or a mural made of lids of plastic bottles around campus in the near future!