Mix and Mingle

Each month, our IGNITE students undertake a Challenge that is centered around one of our three core tenets: Leadership Development, Service-Learning and Civic Engagement. Some months, we incorporate all three - such as November.

On November 12 and 18th, students gathered at The Space Gallery in the Santa Fe Arts District and The Lincoln Center in Fort Collins respectively for an evening designed to explore professional etiquette, leadership in the workplace, and the value of building a strong network. We started the evening with a fantastic speaker from College in Colorado, who shared his story of NFL dreams that went unrealized, and the importance of academic excellence. Later, we were joined by dozens of volunteers from the Denver community, representing a wide-variety of professional fields, from medicine to finance, to non-profit management, to education, to entrepreneurship. You name it, we had it.

Students were asked to design a business card based on their future career goals, and spent the evening mixing and mingling with our professional volunteers, in hopes of connecting with like-minded folks who are just a bit further along their chosen career path, and could offer their experience and expertise.

Invariably, this is among the most popular Challenges of the year, and really demonstrates that the work we do is two-fold: We not only engage our students in the community, but we connect them with opportunity as well. Each year, there are a number of students who land jobs and internships as a direct result of a connection made at the business mixer, and even more whose eyes are opened to possibilities in the professional world that they never even knew existed.