Anonymous

Lately I find I've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes for both HOBY National and HOBY Maryland.  The kinds of things that most people wil never know happened, just one day they show up and everything is ready for them.  Projects that will never have an official attachment to my name, even if I will know that were the product of my, hopefully good, work.

For the national audience, that has meant a lot of social media projects, working to make sure some internal priority lists stay relevant to the field, and often, simply making my voice heard.  Sometimes it's more a philosophy of, if you make enough noise, people start to listen and others it has been simply going with my gut, but either way I feel like I'm seeing positive impact.  I'm not saying people aren't willing to listen or that I'm trying to push my weight around, simply that sometimes you find you have to convince people of the importance of things, even if they will never understand it; and then you make things happen on your own, because otherwise they just sometimes wouldn't.

At the state level, you could argue some of the things have fallen more so under my job description as LSC -- a catch all for anything that needs to happen -- but I don't tend to think so.  No one pushed forward to get the meeting with MSM and everything that has come from it -- we could have gone on just the same without it.   I didn't have to pick up recruitment, or push for a certain set of schools to participate this year, or include the AIP, or continue with career lunch.  But, if I'm not fighting for these things, who will?

Come seminar weekend, there will be plenty of thank yous, but when it comes to something like use of the new dormitories or dance hall, those are things people won't immediately grasp what it means for the organization, or the work it took to make that happen.   Those are the cornerstones for future growth and impact that have been set now, this year, despite the fact that the ambassadors will never know the difference from what was or could have been.   Those are the things that will keep my staff growing in the years to come, and why I see the ranks of our TA and Junior Facilitators beginning to swell.  It's not the things where people know you did the work that make the event successful -- it's the things that they don't perceive, that simply make their time enjoyable and drama free, that simply leaves them saying at the end, "Wow, I had a lot of fun."  And when they then go home and connect to us on Facebook and stay with us in the long run, they'll never know how much we did this year just to make that happen.