ONE Pioneers

November 10th, 2007 at 5:30 am

The PiONEers at Sacred Heart University (SHU) have been up to great work recently, earning 32,640 points in this week alone. I asked chapter president Mike Fazzino to explain the secrets to their success and to give some advice to those considering starting a new chapter. This is the result:

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While the Pioneers here at Sacred Heart are amazing and responded quickly to word-of-mouth advertisement of the ONE Campaign, it did take a little extra bit of work to get the majority of campus to listen with open ears as we’re not exactly a small school with in excess of 4,000 students.

After developing a constitution and electing a President and Vice President, and engaging a wonderful advisor from another department on campus, we became an official ONE Chapter! Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t an easy task, but it was well worth the work. Don’t be intimidated by your administration and don’t take no for an answer; set up meetings, pull strings, and get where you want to be!

Once we were a chapter, we had to gain some members. We’ve got some incredibly motivated student leaders here as well, and it was certainly to our benefit to contact some of them first. Whether it was the President of Student Government, Senate, Greek Life, or even Habitat for Humanity, we were able to gain overwhelming support. So, with the help of “crashing” a few on-campus meetings of other organizations (with their approval), in addition to sending out global emails to our entire student list-serve, we were able to draw over 50 members to our first meeting!

Again, having your first meeting can be a little intimidating, but its nothing to get discouraged about! We were able to introduce our students to the ONE message formally, showing the Campaign video and passing out some information. Once they had a good understanding of the challenge, we split our general members into five groups; Advertising, Athletics, Campus Relations, Community Service, and Public Relations. Each team was to be responsible for tackling the challenges that applied to them, which I (as president) and my vice president divided up.

Doing all this work and planning all on our lonesome, we did begin to feel a little overwhelmed. This brings up another thing to always be conscientious of: don’t think you have to do everything on your own! Because we had so many different groups working on different things, we decided to elect a full board, including not only a secretary and treasurer, but team leaders for each of the teams I listed above. This is another concept that Sacred Heart is proud to have conceived, we chose to call what normally is identified as a “committee” as “teams”. The word team is so much more fun and exciting than “committee” ever was!

After getting a hold of our full Executive Board, we were able to more accurately tackle tasks. Most of them are pretty self explanatory. I think it’s also important for us to not forget about Community Service; it’s what ONE is all about, after all. We’ve already started partnering up on a Thanksgiving Food Drive that is drawing in huge amounts of food for the needy in the Bridgeport Area of Connecticut. Athletics has already started banding coaches and teams, Campus Relations is in talks with Greek Life and Student Government, Public Relations is setting up meetings with all the politicians in the area (from selectmen to senators). Advertising is integral in all of these, and has been doing a phenomenal job of getting ONE’s name out around campus.

Now that we’re going strong, we’ve started gaining even more members, setting up events, and ordering huge quantities of t-shirts and wristbands for everyone! Student Government as a whole has ordered over 80 bands just for their department!

What I’ve realized most is that everyone realizes that ONE is a great organization, and that our message coincides with virtually every other organizations’ mission statement. Look around your campus, figure out who your student leaders are, and go from there. There is a lot of potential everywhere you look, you just need to work together as ONE!

Sincerely,
Mike Fazzino
ONE Sacred Heart University Chapter President
Fazzinom1381@sacredheart.edu