I was reading through this thread discussing the benefits in submitting for a Chairman’s award (and in doing the work behind being able to submit), and it got me wondering about the motivation behind community outreach in general for teams. In my 10 years of FRC neither team I’ve been with has done a ton of community outreach, and definitely not to a level to even think about submitting a Chairman’s award. We’ve only done a few things here and there, and when we have it’s almost always been for personal benefit (built a t-shirt shooter for student recruiting purposes, presentations at sponsors in the hopes of more funding) or because someone externally asked us to (new FLL teacher asked us for help with their team, FTC event coordinator asked if we could demo an FRC robot at their event).
I’ve done FRC for 10 years and am a product of the system, so my own experience is most of my motivation for being involved and trying to spread the message about it. I want to ask what else motivates teams and individuals to do community outreach, and how do you go about motivating others as well? Is the motivation for personal benefit (i.e. we started an off season event because we got sick of only getting to compete at one regional)? Outside requests? Indebtedness to the program? A warm fuzzy feeling inside?
I’m especially interested in how teams started doing outreach outside of FIRST (like Habitat for Humanity, Relay for Life, etc.). Did someone on the team have a personal tie to a cause? Was there a mandatory requirement for volunteering on the team? I notice of a lot of team volunteering seems to be done in the “off season”. How did you convince other team members that it was worth their time to have the team volunteer, rather than “taking a break” in the fall/summer for other activities? Note that I’m not saying “taking a break” is a bad thing, I like having a life and interests outside of FIRST as well. I’m just curious as to what drove others to get out into their communities and to take FIRST from a seasonal sport to a year round activity.
Within the robotics community my team does quite a bit of outreach, just not particularly much related to FIRST. For the past couple years, we’ve worked with a local elementary school to hold a workshop of sorts where a class of second graders comes to see a robot demo and play a game with VEX robots. In the fall we hold a Robotics Open House to showcase what we do during our annual VEX competition. This year we have expanded to hold workshops for area VEX teams. We recognized that here in LA, there are 3 or 4(that I can always think of) powerhouse VEX teams that win every competition. At the same time, there is a saturation of rookie and second-year teams due to the ease and availability of starting a VEX team. A local high school that was looking to start a team approached us last year for help. We opened our shop to them on a Thursday every two weeks to bring their robot and work or just to come and learn things from members of our team. This “workshop” expanded to include 4 high school VEX teams and 2 middle school VEX teams, 4 of which had robots ready to go in time for our annual competition. At our “workshops”, we taught programming lessons, basic and advanced build practices, and also helped teams secure sponsorships and grants to ensure that their teams would outlast their rookie year. On a very loose definition of outreach, we host an annual VEX competition at our school for around 45 teams, our entire team volunteers to run the VEX LA Regional for 70 teams, and we held a small “last-chance” event this year for 30 teams which will be continued in the coming years.
For FRC, one of the aforementioned powerhouse VEX teams started an FRC team this year (FRC# 4563). We approached their leadership and offered our help if they would ever need it. They attended our “kickoff party” and later in the season approached us in need of motor controllers. The final bit of outreach for them was the lending of a few fuses as they realized they needed them to pass inspection before bagging their robot.
For our team, we find it easier to support VEX in our Outreach efforts and as such, also have little chance of a Chairman’s award. In our area, the school district provides little support to teams, and sponsorships, while not rare, are a bit hard to come by so many rookie FRC teams are not sprouting due to the cost of running a team and necessity for a machine shop compared to VEX.
While awards serve as a nice benefit, our team does NOT do Outreach for the purpose of winning awards. Speaking for myself, as the Outreach Executive, I simply like helping people. I don’t like the notion that a team will struggle simply because they don’t have the opportunities that my team does. That partially contributes to my Outreach efforts and reasoning behind opening up our practice (VEX) field up to teams in the area that would like to use it. But I also just like helping people in everything I do.
I do not know if this is why other teams do Outreach, and I can only hope that my teammates can reaffirm my statements.
I was a freshman on the team during our rookie year. We met for the first time as a team on the day of kickoff 2008. After winning the Rookie All-Star Award and winning on the field, and attending the world championships despite the lack of support from our school board and community, we embarked on a mission.
In West Virginia, for every 100 high school freshmen in the state of West Virginia, statistics say that only 16 will graduate from college. On top of that, WV has been very unforgiving to FIRST teams. So we decided to try to make FIRST programs available to every single student in the entire state. We made a goal of starting FLL teams in every middle school in our city within approx. 3 years. We did it in that year, so we expanded. Now, we are working on creating and sustaining FIRST teams in our intensely rural state in order to improve the educational value of the students in West Virginia as well as the educational statistics and opportunities available to the students here in WV.
I hope I don’t come off as bragging or conceited. I just believe that we are in a very unique situation and has a very unique story. I hope this helps! Good luck!