Tag: Golden Hammer

Nailed It

Well, we are still on cloud nine because of this. But, the world keeps on turning, and one of the great events of the last couple of days (non-parenting category) was Sojourn’s first leadership community of the new semester. Last spring we introduced the “Golden Hammer” as a way to celebrate one of our teams that “nailed it” during the past month.

SojournBU won the golden hammer for the first time, and I am so proud of them! They’ve done a solid job inviting new people into the community and we are starting to see some good stories come in. Like this:

We held a welcome/intro event during the first week of class…I had a few students leave our set up time to randomly pass out fliers to people nearby. This was a bit of risk, and you can always look and feel stupid doing these kinds things. But they were up for the challenge and a handful of people who received fliers ended up coming to the event. One of the girls who came ended up joining a small group, at which she shared about her desire to connect more deeply with Jesus. She just didn’t know how to do that at BU. So, it was quite fortuitous that she happened to be handed a flier. Now she’s a part of a conversation about Jesus and Acts and the early church at one of our small group gatherings! Very cool…BU hasn’t had a ton of these kinds of stories but because our students are taking risks and making invitations they are going to become a much more regular occurence.

Northeastern Nailing It…

The Northeastern leadership team took home the Golden Hammer (Nailed It!) Award for the month of March. Here’s how they did it:

Every spring NU holds an event called “Sex Week.” Its intention is to highlight awareness and safety (ie anti-sexual assaults) on campus, but it really turns into a raunchy celebration of sexuality.

Our Sojourn team at NU has long wanted to engage this week and to use it as a platform to talk about sex-trafficking in the city of Boston. The team put together a great event, bringing in a local detective who works exclusively on trafficking cases, a representative from Not-For-Sale (an anti-slavery organization), and providing space for questions and discussion.

The Sojourn event got advertised in the sex week publication (which was great and problematic at the same time…you’d have to see the “magazine” to really understand). Over 60 students showed up (some may have picked the wrong room: our group was in-between a lap dance class and the free condom station). They engaged the presenters and the issue well, asked a lot of good questions, and were really interested in learning and doing more to help the cause.

SojournNU nailed it for a couple of reasons: One, they engaged something already happening on campus. So cool to see them integrate into what most of the students are already a part of there. Two, this was almost entirely student driven. Three, it brought light and redemption to a week on campus that has a lot of hiding and darkness. Four, they highlighted an issue that is significant and troublesome in the greater Boston community.

Proud of the team…they nailed it!