Kickoff and Recharge Events
Fall kickoff and spring recharge events serve largely to build excitement and community within the program. Annually, kickoff and recharge events are used to welcome participants back to Lehigh, reconnect students with their peers, and jumpstart momentum for the projects they will be working on over the course of the year. These energetic, highly fun focused experiences are designed to build community and connection to the program and other participants.
Concept Workshops
These short content based sessions are designed to introduce students to fundamental leadership concepts and skills in a highly interactive way that allows them to gain new information about themselves, group processes, the larger community and leadership theories. These building blocks are developmentally sequenced to align with a students' personal and academic development at Lehigh and to be a beneficial knowledge base for the group projects they are simultaneously executing.
Group Projects
Three distinct group projects are key learning laboratories where students are given the support they need to work with a team of their peers, rising to the unique challenges that the design and deliverable of each project presents. These projects include;
A service learning project during phase one of the program, allowing students to serve and interact with a community agency to ultimately deliver a tangible product that the agency would not be able to execute without their assistance.
An immersion trip experience, challenging students to connect to a larger societal issue understanding how it impacts the local community that they visit. The team will collaborate to creatively portray that issue and other issues facing the community they visit in an educational and inspiring way for the Lehigh and local community to learn from and be moved to take action around. The immersion trip experience will also promote individual identity development through self-reflection opportunities.
Collaboration outside of phase cohorts is one of the most enriching parts of the program and is achieved by having members who have completed certain projects act as resources for other phases working on their projects. These members can contribute in many different forms but generally work with the Phase to decide how to best collaborate.
Reflection Teams
Integrating leadership knowledge, personal experience, and meaningful action is done in small team reflection times. This team time provides a setting where students can consistently process ideas, questions and learning that is happening in the program and how that connects to their experiences and involvements beyond just Leadership Lehigh. Teams correspond with phase cohorts and because group projects are not done with the same set of students who make up a reflection team, students are able to gain insight into the topics and group process of the other group projects and learn from those experiences as well as their own.
Speakers of Interest
Engagement and support of the academic mission of the university is a simple way to stand out as a leader on campus and one that the Leadership Lehigh program values as important to ensure a well-rounded student leader experience. By attending a variety of intellectually stimulating offerings across campus, (ie. visiting lecturers, theatrical or musical performances, dialogs sponsored by offices and academic departments etc. ) students will be exposed to diversity in thought, which will enhance their ability to critically think about their role as a leader and what effective leadership can look like in action across many disciplines.
Spring Recognition Celebration
Motivating and recognizing the effort and dedication of individual students, project groups and reflection teams is a vitally important and fun celebratory component in Leadership Lehigh. Every spring the entire Leadership Lehigh program gathers to celebrate the close of the semester with fun, food, music and games to relax and reward all participants for successfully completing the year and personally growing as leaders. This event is the only time that all of Leadership Lehigh gathers as a large group and the informal setting allows students to connect with their peers over the common leadership learning experience they have all shared.
