Collected Item: “Community Engagement: Transitioning to Zoom”
Give your story a title.
Community Engagement: Transitioning to Zoom
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Screenshot
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
Previous to COVID-19, everything related to community engagement was hands-on, face-to-face, and in-person. However, right after spring break in 2020, everything changed because of COVID-19, and new ways of interacting with the community and each other were used. To demonstrate this I uploaded for this item a screenshot from the Instagram page of the Community Engagement Office of St. Mary's University. Almost none of us were used to zoom and in a couple of weeks zoom turned into the number one platform used by businesses and schools as a means of communication and our community engagement was not the exception. One of the activities that were made during COVID-19 was a Netflix Party through zoom with many students engaged through the network. As a personal experience, I was part of a group/class called Empower: Ecuador that was very focused on personal relationships and community building, and transitioning to zoom was not easy. However, we were able to culminate our semester and encounter new ways to connect with each other through zoom and other social platforms in meaningful ways while keeping each other safe from getting sick. It was a matter of caring for each other so deeply that connecting in person was no longer an option, but our intentionality to connect and interact with each other grew in many other creative ways to achieve the goal of community engagement despite all the difficulties that we were all going through.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
#coveryourfangs, HS3390, CommunityEngagement, TransitionTOZoom, ZOOM, Transition, ConnectingDespiteDistance, EmpowerEcuador
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Community Engagement Office
Give this story a date.
2020-03-15