The student group I am working with is Hapa Student Association and I observed one of the executive board members meetings last Sunday. For those of you wondering what hapa means, quoted from wikipedia "hapa is an Hawaiian language term used to describe a person of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander racial or ethnic heritage". HSA is a multicultural group focusing on raising the awareness of mixed identity and promoting an open and comfortable environment for people that have unique and diverse cultural backgrounds. There are many ethnicity based student organization on campus, since HSA is targeting mixed identities, they are a relatively small group compared to others such as Indian Student Association or Asian American Association. They have roughly 50 members and 6 executive board members, of which 5 showed up at the meeting. I use the questions in the EIL book as a guide and realize I can't answer some of them just by observing at this particular meeting.
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Who is the leader of the meeting?
They don't call it president and vice president, instead, it's primary leader and secondary leader. The primary leader, Isaac, is the leader of the meeting. He has an agenda typed up in his laptop and and they mainly talk about the upcoming events. They do not mention the previous leader at the meeting, but from the last meeting I had with Isaac, we talked about the previous leader and founder of the group, Yuri. He founded HSA because he wants people to recognize the uniqueness of their mixed ethnic background. He has been a passionate leader who has a vision for the group. He bonds the group together. Members respect him very much and hangs out with him a lot, but when he graduates, no one was willing to step up as the next leader, so he appoints the leadership positions from the active member pool. HSA starts as a social group for people who has cross cultural backgrounds to get together and address issues such as identity confusion and branches out to include anyone that is interested in hapa culture.
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Who are the followers in the meeting?
All the other executive board members are followers in the meeting. Most of the time, they wait for Isaac to bring up a topic and they will either agree or offer a different perspective. They all commute from home, have part-time jobs and are involved with other student organizations on campus. So even though it is supposed to be a social group, they have low attendance problems after Yuri graduated. While observing how they interact with each other at the meeting, I realize started from the executive board team, they need to be reminded why they want to join HSA at the first place and the values they believe in. I am sure they enjoy the benefits from being a member of HSA by getting to know more hapa people and be able to articulate and sort out the problems they have in life related to mixed identity. But as time goes on, they tend to treat the leadership position as a task needed to be done rather than aspiring to lead and influence others. There is a little apathy among followers since some are texting and not actively participating in the conversation. But that is probably also due to the fact that it's late afternoon on Sunday and people just come straight from church or work. The executive board members did not point out problems as they are mainly discussing about the logistics of the upcoming events.
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How would you describe the context or
environment?
The primary leader, Isaac, is always the one who initiates the discussion and the members will respond to him directly, there is not much interaction/debates/connection between members. They all seem to be looking at Isaac and waiting for the next item on the agenda and do not have much input to drive the conversation. So I think they need to be assigned more responsibility rather than having Isaac do the work most of the time. The members and leaders are happy, but they need to show more enthusiasm and pride towards the organization. The campus community is very supportive of the organization. They just received the Diversity Enhancement Award from the College of Arts and Science.
Being up from the balcony does not mean relaxing and disengaging from the activity going on. Rather, it allows us to step back and watch the dynamics in the group, so we can identify the hidden problems and patterns and address them in time.
