University of Iowa ‘Life Design’ course inspires generosity

IOWA CITY — When University of Iowa senior Cate Tucker thinks about her volunteer work with Dance Marathon, she thinks about the pop-up holiday store her local chapter opened in the UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital just before winter break.

The idea was to invite pediatric patients being treated for cancer or other illnesses to shop for their parents or the adults in their lives. The kids got really into it, Tucker said.

“We asked patients if they wanted to come with us on a secret mission, and we got presents for their guardian — like mom and dad or grandma or grandpa — we had them pick out presents for whoever was watching over them,” said Tucker, 21.

“The kids loved picking it out. They thought it was super cool. They got to pick out the wrapping paper. It was just really cute to see them get all excited about it.”

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That concept the children intuitively understood — that giving can be just as inspirational as getting — is one that UI honors program associate and longtime Professor Dave Gould decided to explore this fall in his final semester of teaching “Life Design,” an esteemed Blank Honors Center course that over more than a decade has produced community leaders, community events and community change.

“Each semester, I try to create a new learning experience for my students. Many of our past events have centered around finding inspiration from the ‘outside’ and then sharing it with students and community members alike,” according to Gould. “This fall we decided to reverse the process and derive the inspiration from within.”

Gould’s efforts to pull inspiration from within his Life Design students involved inviting them to apply for three $1,000 grants for a student organization of their choosing. The opportunity was for students to think about what organizations had been meaningful in their lives and to the community at large, and then go after snagging the “Grants for the Greater Good” — as Gould christened them.

'Grateful I did’

During a Nov. 28 event in Iowa City’s The James Theater — on the heels of Thanksgiving — student applicants made their pitches before Gould, the peer mentors who helped craft the idea and lead the experience, and also a group of community members.

Tucker, who first started fundraising for Dance Marathon as a freshman at Cedar Rapids’ Xavier High School, was among three Life Design students who applied on behalf of its UI chapter.

“Just applying for this grant was something I've never done before,” Tucker said. “So I was like, why not? And I was really grateful I did.”

Dance Marathon, a national movement of high school and college students raising money to fight pediatric cancer and support those battling it, was among the three organizations that won grants. The others were Ronald McDonald House Charities, which supports families with sick kids, and Rotaract, which fosters leadership and responsible citizenship.

“The plot twist at the end of the night, that only we knew, was that then we would give an honorarium to all of them,” Gould said about $300 gifts given to each student org represented in the applications.

The plot twist that Gould himself didn’t know about came from community members in the audience who — like the kids with cancer shopping at the holiday store — felt the glow that generosity can inspire.

“Here’s the magic that came from it,” Gould said. “Before the night was over, a woman from the audience came up to me and said that she would fund all the other ones that didn't get funding.”

Beyond the $300 honorarium, the donor gave full $1,000 grants to the orgs not chosen — including The Women’s Network, Iowa Women’s Hockey Club and the Rally for Reid Foundation, which also provides emotional and financial support for kids with cancer and their families.

“And by the time I got home, I had a text message from somebody else that said they would fund all of the others,” Gould said, noting The James Theater decided to redirect payment for space rental for the evening toward the organizations also.

“So it's continued to build,” he said. “And I think the thing that makes me so happy is that the peer mentors, going off into their winter break, saw the agency that they have and celebrated the agency of the students.

“And then the community got behind it, and it just became kind of a very poetic, wonderful way for me to end this semester.”

'Innately drawn to do’

The semester end brought Gould to the end of his Life Design instruction, having launched the honors course in 2010 with the aim of helping “students discover what they are innately drawn to do.”

Over its duration, it spawned the idea for a “Reimagining Downtown” course and “The Green Room,” which engaged the entire community by “inviting the city to school.”

In April, Gould created a “Secret Schoolhouse“ as an offshoot of his Life Design work — bringing together a select group of students and community members for an evening of wonder and awe, also at The James.

That is where Tucker found her way to Gould — through a friend in the class.

“I went to The Secret Schoolhouse,” she said. “I was her plus one.”

And the energy was magnetic.

“I wanted to experience that for myself,” said Tucker, whose time in the Life Design course coincided with her first-ever volunteer work on the cancer floor in the Children’s Hospital, something she’s been doing at least weekly this semester.

“It’s opened my eyes to who I’m fundraising for,” she said, sharing that all of it “has really fueled my fire to make my mark for this organization.”

Going forward, Gould is drafting a sort of Life Design 2.0 model that will be self-guided, geared toward a larger undergraduate audience in the hundreds, and still centered on the goal of creating meaning of and in student lives.

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Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com