Big Idea Title: Building Better Bonner Relationships

Name of Congress Representatives: Nic Flores and Isaiah Holmes

Your Proposal:

Our program has been quite successful in incorporating the Bonner motto: Access to Education, Opportunity to Serve. Along with serving the Greencastle and DePauw communities, the Bonners at DePauw have made meaningful impact in other states and countries.

Our Big Idea Proposal will be focused around improving Bonner communities within DePauw. We are doing an excellent job with campus connections and agency interaction within our community. However, we would like to work on building better relations among the Bonner Scholars on DePauw’s campus. We will propose two ideas that we hope to implement into our program’s description.

1.) Bonner Buddy Program - Establishing a Bonner Buddy Program will help strengthen our program by creating close relationships among the fellow Bonners here on campus. These efforts will hopefully be implemented throughout the region. We have superb interactions within the Greencastle community and DePauw community. However, we have noticed a low interaction rate between our Bonner classes (freshmen, junior, etc.) and we would like to build better relationships beyond the Bonner link. We plan to implement this idea by first hosting an event that will address this Big Idea (ex. Class Retreat) and discuss what can be done to improve this connection. We would like for each Bonner to have a “Bonner Buddy” within the DePauw Bonners. Other aspects of the Bonner Buddy Program may involve various hosted events through the academic school year such as video screenings, game days, and/or homework nights.

2.) Political Letter Writing Committee - We feel that the political aspect of the Bonner program can be improved. Bonner has many students involved in politics and Bonner Congress. Therefore, it would be a good idea to actually put our experiences into action outside of Bonner and reach out to surrounding political leaders, administrators and other influential figures within a community. We can start sharing our ideas with others and hope for support and interaction with these figures within the community. This can be a wonderful way to learn about politics, networking and open the door for more opportunities to serve many communities. Suggestions have been made to make this a hourly weekly or biweekly meeting where students can come together over lunch and discuss issues.

We hope that these future events will lead to better overall Bonner relationships within the DePauw community.