Community Discussion Topic

Thank you so much for highlighting this important aspect of engagement through SME Dulce Almazan, CPIM‍! This subject has generated some great discussion and I am excited to help you incorporate some of these ideas into our agenda at Houston 29!


Jacob

Our chapter approaches volunteer events in three ways - educating young students, including K12, engaging older students and emerging professionals and informing the community about the importance of manufacturing.

1. Professional & membership development through events for High School, Postsecondary, or Emerging Professional members
- Engineering week activities offer fantastic opportunities to engage with the young generations. We had engineers going to schools talking about how everyday items are made. For example, every car has a license plate. How is that plate made? How is it designed, manufactured, assembled? Every license plate reminds them of the importance of manufacturing. You may also share the process of making a mouse, a mouse pad, a phone antenna, even expand into satellites and www. PBS has many educational programs that can provide ideas. The possibilities are endless.

2. Advancement of manufacturing through Community events
- Community events are meant to showcase who we are as a manufacturing community. It allows us to talk about our jobs and SME to the public participating. People from all wakes of life attend the community events. Many hospitals raise money with events like Run for a Cure, communities organize tree planting, beach cleaning, food for the homeless, Christmas Toys, Boat racing, and many more. Ideally, chapters would participate as a team, donning SME shirts to raise awareness about the SME. Corporations participate in such events a lot. Since those are charitable events, as a not-for-profit team from SME, you may even get the charitable donation tax credit.

3. Engaging professional and student chapter members through challenges at events and trade shows.
- Participation at Local Trade shows or Expo can engage professional and student chapters members. Building challenge activities for students and engaging the older ones to guide and mentor fits perfectly. SME Events team organizes such activities at almost all SME shows. Connect with them to plan events in your area. If you don't' have an SME show, you may attend some other ones. If that is not possible, try connecting with the libraries, science centers, other associations in your area, or community centers and organizing it as a stand-alone SME Chapter event challenge. 

I'm looking forward to hearing about your ways to volunteer.
Good luck! 
 

Good point Nick. I love that mouse trap powered ping pong ball launcher challenge. Sounds like fun making it, testing it, and watching it, a definite attention getter. I have to connect with you to get some pictures or link to an example. I would like to see that.

Your comment reminds me of similar events that happen at a convention center geared primarily towards high school students. The event brought colleges and recruiters from everywhere. I remember going to one in 8th grade, waaaay back. I have to do some research for that one as I don't know the specific group names that organize such events. Plus, I'm not sure if our purpose would be a good fit in that scenario. But it's worth investigating. We can always team up with the student chapters as an alternative on that one.

Thank you for providing that idea Nick.

Our chapter (125) hosts an event at the local engineering fair. This occurs during engineering week at the science museum in OKC. The E-Fair is organized and put on by the Oklahoma Engineering Foundation for grades 6-12. Many other professional societies host other events at it as well. The event we host requires the students building a mouse trap powered ping pong ball launcher at their school. The students then bring them to the event and compete to see who can score the most points by landing as many ping pong balls in to their targets (12’ distance between launcher and target) in a 3 min time period. It is a lot of fun seeing what the students come up with while still meeting the requirements set forth in the event rules. We usually have a couple hundred students participate. We setup 8 launcher/target stations so it usually goes pretty quick. We usually hav4-8 volunteers from our chapter participate and occasionally get other volunteers from other businesses, Tech schools, or organizations too.

The other one I forgot to mention is 

• Local libraries. During the summer parents want to keep their kids busy and hopefully learning.  Another plus is that this will be indoors, who doesn’t want to stay away from summer heat. I haven’t collaborated with one before, but  know they look for volunteers.