Origins

On February 22, during class, Kris and Darin began to bounce ideas off of each other,
letting the ideas flow to see what would happen. Something Kris and Darin have both expressed
within their personal lives is the importance of taking care of our bodies and minds, especially as
college students, in whatever form benefits us personally. Darin suggested it, and Kris
immediately built upon that suggestion.
In the beginning, Kris and Darin had no clue how this idea would be tangible, but after
discussing it amongst the themselves, they created a list of things that they both recognized as
being beneficial for any and everyones personal care. This list included:

Drinking tea, as Darin noticed that almost every day Kris has a cup of tea, and she has

said that it makes her happy, as well as keeps her calm.

The use of adult coloring books and book like Wreck This Journal.
Meditation/relaxation
Listening to calming/peaceful music

These are only a few things that Darin and Kris came up with, and they agreed that whatever
their civic engagement project turned out to be, it should involve some of those different options.

Development
After about a week of brainstorming, Kris and Darin extended opportunities to the rest of the
class to see who else would be interested in their project. They felt this was important for anyone
in the class to participate in and that it should not be limited, because self-care and preservation
is crucial for everyone, especially those involved on college campuses (even including faculty,
such as Professor Launier.)
Jasmine and Gabby joined the team, and together we all started planning our event. We
decided that in order to keep the scope of our event narrow, that we would give out tea and
motivational messages, because those are two things we felt that a multitude of people would
benefit from, rather than trying to give out things that are more of a niche.
We spent a long time devising a name for our event and our organization, because we wanted
the name to have significance in the UCF community and encompass our main goals and ideas.

We ultimately decided on reCharge, a play on UCFs motto: Charge On, which also stressed
the importance of taking a moment in ones day to assess mental and physical wellbeing. We
could have easily held our event without a name, but we felt that having a name strengthened the
rhetoric of our message: we are not a disorganized student group, merely holding a small event
for a school project; we are a small organization with goals, and the power and idealism to carry
out those goals.

In order to promote a sense of longevity for our project, we decided to create and maintain a
newsletter throughout the school year. We did not want our event to be a one-time occasion,
because the health of students and faculty is not one-time issue. We also believed that students
would receive a newsletter much more than they would any other sort of medium, such as more
frequent tabling or meetups, because we all have busy schedules and cannot always attend
physical events. Jasmine began to create a newsletter on a free platform called TinyLetter
(http://tinyletter.com), which offers simple and ad-free newsletter distribution. The newsletter
provides a method to disseminate self-care tips and words of encouragement without requiring a
social obligation. The choice to produce a digital newsletter is expressed in the beginning of our
first issue, sent on April 27th.
By issuing this newsletter biweekly (that is, once every two weeks), we want to brighten the
days, weeks, and semesters of anyone in need. Handouts are often thrown away, and lectures
forgotten; but emails carry a digital permanence that we believe college students benefit from.
That's why we are digital; we want you to be able to access our tips and encouragements
through any digital medium, and be able to look back, through our archive, of the weeks of love
and care that we provide.

Planning
When the planning really got rolling, we were asked to figure out how to measure each
individuals contributions and how we would determine individual accountability. It was here

that everything started to fall together and flow very well. Kris and Jasmine agreed to work
together to research and reach out to some local tea shops and cafs for possible partner- and/or
sponsorships. Gabby volunteered to reach out to the different offices on campus and find out
what we would need to do to secure any space on campus. Darin volunteered to keep running
documents of all meetings and discussions that took place, as well as reaching out to the
Recreation and Wellness Center and later Health and Wellness Services to ask for possible
partnership. All of these contributions gave everyone a part to do, and without these
contributions, the project as a whole would have not been as successful as it has been.
During the planning process, we each have been in contact with several people and offices
around UCF as well as the surrounding community. We all came together and used our interests
and networking skills to contribute in ways that none of us could have imagined. Kris served as
our tea expert, as well as spoke to possible speakers when we were originally planning to hold
a bigger event than tabling. Gabby emailed and spoke to many different people on campus,
including staff members and the Assistant Director of OSI, and her outreach helped us secure a
space. Jasmine not only reached out to a local tea place and collected a donation of tea from the
Dandelion Communitea Caf (http://dandelioncommunitea.com/), but also did most of the
graphics that were involved in our tabling event. Darin kept in close contact with Health and
Wellness Services at UCF, as well as took note of all discussions. Each of us has spent several
hours a week since the end of February working on this event, about 3 hours each week between
communicating with each other as well contacting the necessary offices from the UCF
community. We spent a lot of time in contact with each other just to make sure each every person
was always on the same page.

Setbacks
There has been a lot of change in the course of planning this event, but we have all been
flexible in our collective vision and what we hoped this event would become. At first, we were
hoping to have a full event in the Student Union with a speaker and a possible raffle. Our hopes
were very high and we realized quickly that we would have to tone down the scale of our event.
We talked about it and decided that we wanted to have a tabling event. We couldnt figure out
how to fit or acquire permission for some of our ideas, such as the raffle, into our event, so we
dropped them.

Eventually, we decided to focus this event as an awareness campaign, because as students at

a four-year university, we all understand the importance of finding balance between school,
work, home, volunteerism, extracurricular activities, and whatever else life may throw in our
paths. Many times, we ignore taking proper care of our minds and bodies as students, whether it
is pulling an all-nighter, forgetting to stay hydrated, or even just putting too much on our
plates.
We ended up going back to the drawing board and creating several plans. We were caught
between deciding to hold it in the Student Union, or on the Free Speech Lawn or at Lake Eola.
We debated on what would be the best space to help communicate to our audience, and what
would seem genuine. We changed our vision of what we hoped this would be, but it only helped
us figure out exactly what the event needed to be. After much discussion, we concluded that an
event held on campus would be the most successful, as our intended audience was college
students in need of motivation, encouragement, and wellness. We decided to hold the event on
Study Day, April 27th, as we believed our message would serve students best in the midst of this
hectic finals period. In the end, we decided and were able to partner with Health & Wellness
Services to get a table on the Free Speech Lawn. We put together and gave out small bags with
motivational quotes, a tea bag and a small tea light candle. We decided to hold our event at the
Free Speech Lawn because of its central location to the library, where many students would be
venturing on Study Day. Our proximity to the library allowed us to interact with many students
and faculty members on their way from the parking lot to the library, or from one building to
another. We were concerned that our message might be muddled by others on the Free Speech
Lawn, such as those loudly promoting creationism or condemning homosexuality. But luckily,
the groups that joined us on the lawn were kind and promoted similar messages to our own.
One large setback we encountered was not getting permission to make and give out hot tea at
our tabling event, as this was originally going to be a staple of the event and a way to encourage
busy students to take a short break from studying to relax and attend to their minds and bodies.
Although Jasmine and Kris worked hard to acquire samples of tea from local tea shops, we
ultimately discovered that we were not permitted to serve the tea because it was neither
prepackaged nor a Coke product. The news shocked us, mostly because it arrived rather late into
the planning process due to bureaucratic delays. We found the idea that small cups of tea could
not be served on UCFs campus because it was not a Coke product to be pretty ridiculous, as the

only tea-like products produced by the Coca-Cola Company are expensive, sugary, and generally
unhealthy. Although we wanted to provide a healthy and mindful service to UCF students, we
were hindered by commercial contracts between the university and the Coca-Cola Company.
Ultimately, we decided to give out tea bags instead of giving in to UCFs policy of Coke
products and serving a beverage that went against our message of mental and physical health.

Final Experiences
We are very pleased with the process of how everything came together. Ultimately, we gave
out all of our supplies and accomplished our goal of spreading awareness and providing a small
service to students in need. We spent about 4 hours altogether on April 27th, working on our
event. Gabby, Jasmine and Darin met a about 9:40. Gabby and Darin then went to the RWC and
got a table and fliers from Health and Wellness Services. We were concerned that turnout would
be low after the events that occurred the previous day at the library. A message was posted on
social media claiming that there was a woman with a gun in the library; the library was
evacuated, and policemen with rifles were sent in to search for the supposed gunwoman.
Although no gunwoman was found, we were worried that a potential terrorist threat would
discourage people from going to the library, or to campus in general, to study. Luckily, this did
not seem to be the case; campus was as crowded as ever. At the end of our time, we were able to
talk to many students who felt that we were doing a really cool thing. So many people expressed
how important our event was, especially on Study Day. We garnered a lot of positive feedback
and reactions, and it made everything worth the stress and hard work.
Our suspicions were confirmed that college students are more-than-willing to listen to a
message if there are free things involved. We welcomed every passerby with a Good morning!
and a quick description of our cause, but many people walked by without even acknowledging
our presence. Despite those who seemed uninterested, we gained a lot of attention from students
on their way to the library or venturing between buildings. A couple of people hung out around
our table for a while, which we found surprising. It reminded us of the civic engagement project
produced last year, the A Problem that Concerns Me chalkboard event. We anticipated that our
event would be a quick onewe would pass out our supplies and people would sign up for the
newsletter on their own timebut people were surprisingly interested in hearing us speak, in
looking at every piece of material we had on our table, and in standing around to soak up the sun

and positive messages. One of our favorite responses we received was when a man was given a
care packet and replied with Wait, why are you doing this? as if he couldnt believe that we
didnt have some ulterior motive.
From our proposal to the event itself, we learned and have grown a lot. We reached out to
more people than we got responses from, but that is okay. We were able to focus a lot on the
rhetoric and impact that our event would have by keeping it on a small scale. We were able to
apply a lot of what we learned to this one event. Our bodies hold rhetoric because as college
students, we were able to relate to our target audience in a way that faculty and staff at UCF
cannot. That in itself is symbolic, in addition to the fact that we were able to easily identify with
our target audience and created an event where not only did our target audience get to directly
participate, but we were able to as well. With our event, we were able to change some of the
reality of finals: usually, its a stressful time and some students cannot handle it, but we were
able to stop over 90 students on campus and change how they looked at the day. Our event was
visual and attention-grabbing, which is important on a college campus, and also aided in the
narrative of some of the students we spoke with. Our table was unintentionally placed near
another group doing a similar thing, and some of the students with their organization actually
stopped by our table and congratulated us on our event. It was small, but still very powerful.
We measured impact by how many subscribers we acquired for our newsletter and by how
many supplies we were able to give out at our event. We received 21 subscribers to our
newsletter. Although this does not seem like a large number compared to the amount of people
we talked with, or the amount of students on campus overall, we are pleased with the result. We,
as a group, decided early into the planning process that as long as we impacted one person
positively, we succeeded in our task. We created 80 care packages, with tea bags and words of
encouragement and motivation, and gave out every single one. When we were nearly out,
Jasmine ran to her dorm to gather any extra tea bags she could find. Overall, we handed out over
90 care packages, and impacted even more through giving out our motivational cards by
themselves, and just by our presence as a positive force on campus.

Pictures from Developing, Planning, and Setbacks

Below are many pictures from the start of our efforts to the event itself. There are some
handwritten notes, some screenshots from our messages to each other, mock-ups of the
motivational cards we produced, as well as Darins interaction with Natalie from Health and
Wellness Services at UCF. This was the basis of all our work; without this, our event would have
not been as successful as it was.

Pictures from the Event

Below are pictures from the event itself, including photographs of our table setup, visitors
who attended, and screenshots from our small feature on Channel 35 News!