The Jefferson Awards Foundation is a national organization with a mission to \u201ctrain and empower youth to be leaders and changemakers.\u201d Furman\u2019s Shucker Leadership Institute (SLI) intends to \u201cprepare students for a lifetime of meaningful leadership and service.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those parallel visions found a way to intersect last November when SLI hosted Jefferson\u2019s Students in Action Fall Leadership Conference in a packed Watkins Room at the Trone Student Center.<\/p>\n
Nearly 300 high school students from schools in Upstate South Carolina attended workshops designed and presented by Shucker Fellows<\/a> based on a curriculum Jefferson provided. Sessions focused on leadership and team building, communication, the root causes of poverty, community service, and measuring the impact of service projects, with the goal of making students more efficient and effective in the implementation of volunteer activities at their individual schools.<\/p>\n This marked the second year SLI has hosted the program but the first time it was held on Furman\u2019s campus. After seeing how well the Fellows performed in 2014, it wasn\u2019t difficult for Heather Love, the South Carolina Jefferson Awards Foundation director, to decide to deepen the relationship.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Shucker Group, they\u2019re awesome students and they\u2019re so professional and they take this opportunity to volunteer with the high schools very seriously,\u201d she said. \u201cThey do a lot of prep work to be fully prepared to lead these workshops. They got rave reviews from the high schools on the evaluation forms.\u201d<\/p>\n Grace Ellen Hannah \u201919 applied to be a Shucker Fellow precisely for opportunities like these, and, undaunted by speaking in front of so many people, she led a morning session on leadership and team building<\/p>\n \u201cWe talked about different traits that people possess and how to\u00a0best bring out those traits to\u00a0make a team work effectively,\u201d Hannah, who came to Furman from Tallahassee, Fla., said. \u201cWe talked a lot about leading by example and how \u2026 it just takes one person to start a positive action.\u201d<\/p>\n