Now we move from academic review and practice exercises to small projects with much higher stakes in “real world” professional writing. We may still do occasional bits of textbook work in places, but the remainder of the semester will focus mainly on project work for local nonprofits with writing needs that we can help with at little or no cost. In other words, we provide cheap labor!

Our first community partner is the Forest Hills Church Backpack Buddies Ministry in Macon, where roughly 350 good souls volunteer each month procuring, packing, and distributing food packages to 3000 students at twenty-eight elementary schools across four counties. Each Friday these children take home grocery bags of food, snacks, and healthy drinks to their families who desperately need it, especially over weekends, when breakfast and lunch at school are not available.

We are in talks with the significantly larger Middle Georgia Community Food Bank, which channels food to various food pantries and church organizations and other non-profits in twenty-four counties. Fingers crossed that our PFWR 4660 class can help both organizations with your professional writing skills and talent.

Starting small:

Over the next three units we will complete two small-scale writing projects to get our feet under us; then we will shift into larger-scale and increasingly more impactful work through the rest of the term.
Collaborative Project 1 (CP1) consists mainly of forming two teams, establishing leadership and collaborative communications methods, and taking preparatory steps for the finished product (aka “CP2”)—a polished, thoughtfully researched, highly persuasive two-page letter asking the massive Newell Brands Company to donate ten Rubbermaid laundry carts to the Forest Hills Backpack Ministry. The Backpack Ministry has paid retail, typically $225, for 101 of these collapsible carts needed for sorting, storing, and delivering the food to carefully selected students at participating school. (During the pandemic they purchased several carts for more than $400 apiece.) I will visit Forest Hills this week and take pictures of their warehouse, packing rooms, and Rubbermaid carts to share with you.

Collaborative Project 1: the specific assignment

Through this project and the next, two teams of five students will compete to have their final product (the “Rubbermaid letter” in CP2) signed off on by the Backpack Ministry’s director, Brenda Lambert, and mailed to Newell Brands.

You may choose more inventive names, but for now, we have Teams A and B, with arbitrarily chosen group leaders, which you can change as you like if the leader indicated would rather suffer public torture than be team leader:

Team A: Emalyn as leader, with Caris, Kristen, Rose, and Katlyn
              
Team B: Haley as leader, with Cassidy, Zach, Rambone, and Rylan

  (I will post email addresses in a D2L news announcement for both teams.)

Project Tasks -- due not on the weekend, but Tuesday, February 25th by 9:00 p.m.

• Set up communications, primarily of video-conference meetings (in Teams, Zoom, Skype, Hangouts, etc.). Choose tools and methods proven effective in past experience.
  
  
• Ponder, plot, and produce quality research that may prove valuable to the overall project. You should as a group discuss what research is most needful: for starters, learn as much as you can on
  
  
• our Forest Hills partner, including online and TV news coverage, social media presence, etc.
  
  
• perhaps on Backpack ministries or food pantries more generally
  
  
• Rubbermaid in various obvious respects
  
  
• benefits for large corporations in community involvement
  
  
• and more—including one glaringly obvious issue that I won’t name here. 😊
  
  
• Create and complete a carefully detailed Audience and Use Profile (AUP) of the sort we used in the first Individual project.
  
  
• Assign brainstorming tasks to all members, aiming to generate powerful, intelligent, and truly persuasive tactics to pursue in the letter that the team will develop in the next unit.

What you submit: a document from each team outlining your progress on each of the specific tasks above, including timeline and who worked on what. If you ran into significant challenges, mention those at least briefly. No need to include all the details your research uncovered, but do summarize the most salient points. Also include the AUP, either in the larger document or as a separate file.