Event Recap

For this blog post I am referring to the Pantherfest panel group meeting I attended last friday. As many of you know Pantherfest is a fall welcome concert UWM puts on each year. Last year and this year i have been appointed through my work on the Campus Activities Board to work on the panel. Eight years ago when the tradition of Pantherfest had begun it was completely ran by staff. Over the last few years the panel has evolved to be more student ran. Each year a student Co-Chair is elected by the panel to work besides our staff chair and each committee also has a staff and student chair. This I felt worked as an example of the Human Relations approach. The flow of power moves more horizontally than vertically. From start to finish they are only making decisions as a group in its entirety or the entirety of its small sub groups and the staff does not over power the students or vice versa. I feel like our working group fits in with what McGregor's family metaphor. Our overall Co-chairs would act as more of the parents and the rest act as little workers but all for a common goal.
  Out of the four flows I felt that Activity Coordination/ Self- structuring was the most relevant to our group. The Pantherfest panel is responsible for the panther street fest as well as pantherfest as well as all of the tiny details in-between. The groups are broken down into the panther street fest working group, marketing, logistics and artist selection. Each working group is working toward the larger goal but individually meets weekly to successfully complete the smaller goals they must be achieved in order to create the event as a whole.
  At our first meeting we spent a great deal of time looking at applicants for the student co-chair. The group agreed on policies and standards at which the chair must fit. We each took time discussing each applicant and then voted which our top three would be in order to bring them in for interviews which will occur in our second meeting. Overall i would say that the Pantherfest working group is a great organization to be apart of for its ability to create safe horizontal communication and even organization between the goals and times to achieve that goal. Below i posted some pictures of the working group and our view of the festival and concert!