WEEK 4
This week we concentrated on finalizing the mission statement, finished up our storytelling segment, and prepared and executed our presentation at ICUR (Idaho Conference for Undergraduate Research).

Helping students build credibility through their personal stories, experiences and beliefs.
We decided that personal stories would be our first step towards building credibility and creating agency. Our readings discussed various ways to craft a story and gave practical instruction such as using The CASTLE Method to create an interesting story.
C — Character
A — Action
S — Structure
L — Language
E — Emotion
Storytelling Benefits
- Increases self-esteem and establishes credibility
- Helps build trust
- Develops oral communication and writing skills
- Inspires students to take action for change
- Forms a bridge between communities and individuals
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We reflected on our readings from last week and focused on the importance of personal purpose. I was interested in the concepts presented in Discovering Your Self explaining the importance of developing our credo, competences and confidence as three essential aspects of self.

We determined that self-trust and earning the trust of other people is a result of developing our credo, competences and confidence.
Credibility is achieved when someone tells a personal story the audience can relate to. This creates a transformational experience.

Another of our readings introduced the concept of “The Sweet Spot” in which personal, organizational and role purposes intersect. I felt this could easily be transferred to the Ethos Project as a tool for individual and organizational reflection and direction.
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Our presentation at ICUR was the highlight of the week.

We prepared by drafting our own story and creating our outline for the presentation.
We transferred our ideas from the whiteboard to a Google Doc with visuals.
Dr. Myers created our final PowerPoint presentation.
The Presentation
- Kelsea’s story took us back to her English 304 class where Ethos first originated with a circle of students telling their “This I Believe” stories.
- Zach presented a condensed version of his symposium presentation which was very powerful.
- Zach and Kelsea did a great job in relating the history of The Ethos Project including the steps they took in building the workshops, assigning the board member positions, and preparing for the symposium.
- Zach spoke about his epiphany of Ethos becoming something more the night after the symposium. He and Kelsea explained the reasons Ethos needed to pause in order to take the time to determine what it would take to really create a sustainable organization. Dr. Myers explained how this pause lead to the Ethos course.
- I told the story of how I discovered the Ethos course and my experience on the first day of class.
- We presented the audience with an overview of our process of the past four weeks — delving into social change theory and developing our own models, our research into Boise State to discover student needs, examining what makes a successful organizations and how we might apply their ideas to Ethos, our whiteboard brainstorm sessions, and applying public narrative and organizational communication to figure out our mantra, motto and mission.
- Dr. Myers wrapped up our presentation and we opened it up to the audience for discussion.

We didn’t have a large audience, but we all agreed it was a great opportunity to develop and present the material. It allowed us to organize and assimilate our ideas and envision the larger picture of where Ethos is now and where it might be headed in the future.

