Summer-loving Jake will finally discover winter when he visits campus on January 24, 2009! Why? Because that is when DigitalBridges2.0 and Middlebury College and Life is good Inc to do LIG's first-ever winter festival and launch a new College tradition in the process: the annual MIDDSnowbuddies Festival Series in the process.
We will join Life is good Inc to establish an annual, student-led exercise in social entrepreneurship and civic engagement that offers local and regional folks an opportunity to have fun together in the middle of winter while they help kids in need. All funds raised by the Festival will be donated to the Life is good Foundation.
The festival series will be built around a winter theme: snow-based activities anchored by building thousands of “snowbuddies.” We will set the Guinness world record for building snowbuddies in 2009, and then challenge future groups to break it each subsequent year. Other activities (in Olympic Village, Chillivile and Jaketown) will include sledding, sleigh rides, snowshoeing, live entertainment, food venues, possibly a craft fair and an auction. Snow games will include Wiffle ball, volleyball, kick ball, ultimate Frisbee, human dogsled races, raisin spitting for distance, broom hockey and much, much more.
Each Festival will be planned and executed using the well-tested process that produced nine highly-successful DigitalBridges2.0 January conferences. Beginning each fall, event-planning professionals will mentor and give students an intensive introduction to event planning, organization, management, marketing, and fulfillment. Working in cooperation with Life is good, Inc. and their mentors, students teams will do extensive research, build topic-specific expertise and create and execute plans for each aspect of the Festival.
The students will also work with the College Alumni Office in recruiting alumni participation in the festival, and invite Addison County town governments, civic and service organizations, schools , the Middlebury (and Vermont) Chamber of Commerce, and businesses throughout Vermont to get involved as well.
Each team will write a final action memorandum and compile an annotated bibliography that will be integrated into a comprehensive manual and Web site for guiding future students and especially for the community's enjoyment.
Therefore, while the traditional format of the DigitalBridges2.0 Winter Conference Series is morphing into the Snowbuddies Festival series, we see only positives for students and our local and regional communities in the change. Students who are drawn to social entrepreneurship will now learn and do it first hand. In the process, they will have to be innovative and take risks as they figure out how to solve problems and seize opportunities that appear along the way. As such, enrolling in MIDD Snowbuddies 2009 offers students a wonderful opportunity for acquiring new skill sets and experience, and mostly for learning for the road ahead.
Moreover, not only will we engage alumni and parents to participate (play!) in the Festivals, the College will be offering our neighbors in Middlebury and beyond to mingle and have fun, and all the while be helping kids in need.
Seems like a classic win-win to me.
Want to get involved in the process and building a new MIDD tradition? Just let us know and we will reach out to you.
To learn about the many other opportunities you and your family has to combine having fun with helping kids in need, be sure to check out Life is good's Summer 2008 festival schedule.
