In my Writing for Public Forums class we often work on projects and then we get an assignment to reflect on the project through our online blogs. The most recent project I have been working on is the development of a made up RSO, which is a Recognized Student Organization at my university. The project assignment was to first create a proposal for the group you decided to create. It had to include all the criteria that any real RSO proposal would have including, an organization name, the need for the group at the university, the mission statement, people who would benefit, planned activities that we would do to fundraise, member biographies, and we also had to pick a potential faculty advisor who we thought would be a good supporter of our group. Sounds like a long proposal right? It wasn’t too bad actually. We quickly decided to create a group to support the genocide that is currently happening in Darfur. Our school had not yet created an RSO so we decided our name would be Save Darfur @ UW. There is a national group called Save Darfur but part of their organization is to allow mini branches to form and give donations so we can send as much money as possible to help Darfur. Our mission was to raise awareness, get people to join our group, and raise as much money as possible to help the National Save Darfur organization send funding to Darfur to give them housing, food, clothing, and much more. The proposal was fun for me because my group agreed on everything and we all had the same ideas of what we wanted to propose so we worked well together.

     Besides creating a proposal for the RSO, we also had to take a stand on an issue besides what our group stood for. This part of the project was a lot more difficult for me. It took us almost 3 class days to figure out what we wanted to write about. I am a criminal justice major and so are two other members of my group so immediately we were checking out legislation that has been created about Darfur. We wanted our position to be for or against a piece of legislation that had recently been created. This was a lot more difficult than we thought because the language of the law is super confusing. (I think they do that on purpose so that not everyone understands enough to disagree.) So we asked my intelligent English teacher for help and she enlightened us that our position did not need to be so focused and we should look at doing a broader topic. From that we decided that our position would be that we believe that America should be involved in international issues. From there I made an outline and assigned each member of our group to take a paragraph or two and we completed that. It was strange for me how little editing I had to do once everyone sent me their finished pieces and I was to put the final paper together. My group was so much on the same page, that all I had to do was add a few transitions to each section of the paper.

      Currently we are working on the brochure and poster which serve the purpose of informing others about our group and what our position is on the brochure, and recruiting members from our poster. This project has been really interesting. At first I thought it was going to be so difficult to write papers in a group and making posters because usually I am such an individual worker, but it all came together very well and I was pleased with the hard work my group put forth. Also, the project was so cool because I really learned a LOT about Darfur. It took a lot of research on a subject that I had never really looked at in depth before. This project made me want to truly get involved with Darfur someday soon. One thing that I discovered was how you can get your politicians in your state to vote yes on Darfur legislation and I am definitely going to do that. You call a number and just give them your name and email address and they put you on a petition to send to Barbra Cubin, or whoever your leader is. It’s pretty cool the information that we found about how to get involved. The RSO project not only gave me a bigger insight on how to work in a group, but also affected me in my thoughts to give back to the less fortunate.