This post is part of our Voices series, featuring Net Impact leaders around the world who are making a difference on their campuses and in their careers. They’re sharing their insights and their inspirations, in their own words.
A few weeks before the 2014 Net Impact Conference, we received notice that Gonzaga University Undergraduate was officially made a Net Impact chapter. Excited with the news, I packed for Minneapolis and set out for the “Breaking Boundaries”-themed conference to explore what breaking boundaries meant for me – and our chapter. As a new member of Net Impact, I didn’t know what to expect, but connecting with the larger community has inspired me to not only “be the change I want to see in the world” but to inspire others to do the same.
I was inspired by the speakers like Dan Pallota and Mark Horoszowski and wanted to find a way to bottle that inspiration and share it back on campus. I knew if I could inspire others on my campus to drive change the total impact we would create would be greater than the sum of our individual impact. So in an effort to not only create another club on campus, but a movement, our founding team set out to build a community with diverse interests, experiences, and talents, rooted around the question, “How can I make a difference?”
Our Gonzaga Chapter is beginning to network and collaborate with other groups on campus to scale our events and local impact. We’re also launching a student and professor speaker series next semester which will center around our chapter’s topic committees: human rights, public health, poverty alleviation, education, and sustainability. And we’re making a difference off-campus too. I lead our chapter’s Education Committee, which has partnered with Spokane charter school Pride Prep to start a mentorship program focused on literacy, one of the biggest local education challenges.
The Net Impact Conference encouraged me to be a catalyst of change in the world I experience every day. That means building the foundation for this chapter to thrive long after I graduate and making a difference in student’s lives on-campus and off. Finding my passion in education has been a multi-year journey, and my hope is that our chapter will help students identify which values and talents they can use to guide the world to a better future. That hope is already closer to becoming a reality as we prepare to collaborate with Gonzaga’s Career Center to promote more jobs and internship opportunities for change.
At one of last meetings, our Chapter President, Aaron Danowski, said that the world will never be perfect, but it can and should be better. As a generation, if we adopt this mindset, we can harness the most powerful force in the world: hope. The hope for a better future is what’s driven our Net Impact Chapter to grow from 16 people in our first meeting to over 50 just a month later.
I have always believed that my generation was born into a world filled with boundaries; I also believe the boundaries before us are surmountable but will require out-of-the-box thinking and leadership not just from a few, but from all of us. Our new chapter helps move that change forward through small actions -- small actions that serve as the catalyst to the entire impact movement. This is how some of the world’s toughest issues will be eliminated. One person, one chapter at a time.
Kelsey Moyes is a sophomore at Gonzaga University, majoring business administration with a concentration in marketing and minoring in psychology. She serves as the Vice President of Event Planning and Membership as well as co-leader of the education topic committee for the Net Impact Gonzaga undergraduate chapter.
