AUTUMN RITTER
Minnesota State University - Mankato, Class of 2022

I chose to volunteer at the Mankato location of Habitat for Humanity, where I worked three to five hours every Friday. I actually enjoyed this experience so much that I continued to volunteer every Friday even after I had already reached my 20 hour requirement for the class. Most days, I worked in the Restore stocking shelves, operating the cash register, or cleaning the building; however, I would also get to work in the office with many of the Habitat for Humanity executives on occasion. When I worked in the office, I would help them with various clerical work that need to be done, which allowed me to communicate one-on-one with the executives and ask any questions I had about nonprofit organizations and how they operate.

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Although this experience doesn't fit the traditional mold of research, it operated as a form of research for me because it allowed me to gain first-hand experience into the everyday operations of nonprofits, their boards, their financial systems, and the innerworkings of successful nonprofit operation. Essentially, I saw this research as broken into three parts: (1) my interactions with customers and nonprofit employees, (2) my attendance at the board meeting, and (3) my communication with the Executive Director, Connie Ireland. Employee-customer interaction is obviously a huge part of a nonprofit organization because the customers are quite literally the exact population being served by the organization. I was able to analyze these interactions and see how they play a role in the functioning of the company. The Board meeting was also component of information for me. I attended the South-Central Minnesota chapter Board meeting on October 21st, 2019 at the Mankato Public Library. At the meeting, the executives gave an overview of the successes that each location has had within the past year, their finances, and what they are looking to accomplish in the near future as well. The Board is a huge part of nonprofit organizations, as they are the people who make every decision for the company. I was able to gain major knowledge about the way elections are conducted, the fundraising process, and the concept of strategic planning. Lastly, I communicated on a regular basis with the Habitat for Humanity-Mankato Executive Director, Connie Ireland, in which I asked frequent questions about not just Habitat for Humanity, but also nonprofit organizations in general.

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I believe I practiced very active information literacy and synthesis throughout this experience. I accessed information be asking questions and making many observations about the functions of nonprofits, which I was able to incorporate into my previous knowledge base both that I previously knew and that I had been learning at the time through the NPL 273 course. I then used all the information I had gathered to fulfill my research goal of gaining first-hand exposure to an active and successful nonprofit organization such as Habitat for Humanity. I gathered information from a lot of individuals during this experience, and many of the thoughts or opinions differed, so I had to use these different perspectives in combination with my own perspective to create one coherent guiding principle. 

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Overall, this experience helped me do much more research into nonprofits, how they function, and their role in society. This information will be extremely valuable to me as I continue into various roles within the nonprofit sector. I feel not only more knowledgeable, but also more capable of my ability to perform successfully as a potential board member of organizations like these.