This page is referenced by:

• 1 2018-05-07T07:53:37-04:00 Future of Indigo 1 This last section is a blueprint of action steps for the future of Indigo. image_header 2018-05-08T10:37:45-04:00
  Past Steps

  Something we have struggled with in the past has been the lack of awareness of Indigo and what services we want to offer.

  This past semester we made great strides to address this problem.

  • Each member sending email pubs at least once a week
  • Contacting other mental health and cultural groups
  • Having our pubbing materials completely redesigned
  • Doing door drops in the freshman dorms and personally reaching out to specific people as recruitment for new members

  These efforts were met with much success. We will be increasing the number of people in our group for the next semester. Also, many of us were able to talk about Indigo to strangers without being met with, “What’s that?” Now, more and more have said, “Oh, I’ve heard of that!” or “I’ve seen the emails.”

   
  Room for Improvement
  It also gave us a starting place to learn from.
  • Emailing the same email every week was not always welcomed
    • We need to identify critical times of each semester in which we should send an email pub blast
    • Individualized/differentiated the posters and pub emails
      • We’ve struggled with how to do this in the past because our group tries to encompass so many issues and identities. We feared that sending more specific pubs could be alienating or not giving equal attention to the different issues.
  • We should have a central zone for communications and resources involving the group
    • Delegating outreach to a staff member
    • Creating a schedule of the events people want us to go to
    • Keeping track of what roles we take on at different events and what kinds of discussions or presentations we give
  • Create some type of anonymous feedback form so that people could let us know what they thought we were doing right/wrong/do better
   
  Future Directions
  Finally, in my research of other peer counseling groups and from feedback from current Indigo members:
  • Sufia and I are in another class together and we used our final project to create a workshop for Indigo. It’s premise lies in education people on microaggressions. Groups like SHARC and Room 13 have their own workshops, Gender 101 and the Listening workshop respectively. We decided it would be useful to have some sort of uniform workshop. It would help us address two things. First, giving the group a manual that they can draw from during future discussions with cultural groups. The second, it would create a workshop that we could give to other groups that had some interest in learning more about microaggressions.
  • We have begun to look into the possibility of using some kind of online counseling service. This would take on the form of texting services or online messaging similar to the peer counseling services at Tufts. Other peer counseling groups at Harvard had presented this before, but could not get the gears in motion. We believe our service would really benefit from such a service because of how stigmatized mental health is for the communities we work with.
  • Finally, we will be meeting with Dean Roland Davis of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to discuss if he might become one of our supervisors! This is exciting because we have been down a supervisor. Also, the ODI could open new doors and increase our presence on campus substantially.

  It is all so exciting! I am sad that I will be unable to be a part of all these new experiences. Yet, I leave this book for them. I have so much faith in the members I am leaving behind to run this group. I believe in our mission. I believe the college needs us. And I hope our group will be the first of many to come around the U.S.