Interview

A student is conducting an interview for their assignment. The interviewee's identity will remain anonymous and the recording won't be used in the final podcast. The interviewee joined Carolina Thrift by filling out an application on the Heal Life page. They were looking for a thrifting or sustainability organization and found Carolina Thrift. They were excited but apprehensive when they first joined. The organization is smaller than expected, with only the executive team. Carolina Thrift aims to reduce waste on campus and promote responsible consumerism through events like collection drives and thrift swaps. The organization manages their goals through weekly meetings, delegation, and using Trello. Meetings are relaxed and informal, although icebreakers can be awkward. Older members may share more during icebreakers. Small group conversations are less structured and often filled with small talk. Just wanted to make sure that you know that this interview will be submitted for the pre-work in my assignment, but your identity will remain anonymous and the recording will not be included in the final podcast or anything. Is this good with you? Yeah, it's good with me. Awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. It means a lot. Before we get into the specifics of your role in Carolina Thrift, I would just love to learn a little bit more about how you got involved in the club in general. Could you describe the steps you took to become part of Carolina Thrift? I originally applied my freshman year in September or October. There was an application on the Heal Life page for Carolina Thrift that I filled out. I had a few short answer questions about why I wanted to be part of the club and what skills and prior experience I could bring to the club and just kind of other things like that. What led you to find the Heal Life page? Were you looking for it or did you just happen to come across it? I wasn't looking for it specifically, but I was looking for just some sort of thrifting or sustainability organization. I've always really been into thrifting and I was also in a club in high school that had a really big thrift sale at the fundraising event at the end, so I think I was just looking for ways to continue being part of something similar when I got to college. When I saw that Carolina Thrift was an option, I was immediately intrigued. Imagine that you were reading that email when you first got accepted to be on the Carolina Thrift leadership team. How did you feel when you first became part of the club? I remember hearing back actually pretty fast. I was expecting there was going to be some sort of interview or just something more of a face-to-face interaction with a team member before I was invited to join, but that didn't end up being the case. They just sent an email that I was in the first meeting I'd come to, so I was pretty excited, but I was also a little bit apprehensive just because I felt like I was kind of in the dark about the organization and what my responsibilities would be and stuff. Gotcha, yeah. Was there anything that surprised you or that was different from your expectations after you joined Carolina Thrift? I think the size of the organization was a lot smaller than I was expecting, so there's no general body of the club. It's just the exec team, so sometimes the meeting, if there's usually people absent and stuff, it can have as little as 10 people at a meeting. Oh, I see. So now, after being in Carolina Thrift for a year or so, how would you sum up the goals of the club and the role on campus to someone who knew nothing about the organization? I would say the main goal of the club is to reduce waste on UNC's campus and promote responsible consumerism. So we plan a yearly collection drive around move-out time at the end of the year, and then we store all of the clothing and the furniture donations over the summer, and then we resell the stuff at the start of the semester in August at our big sale. So it's really all about repurposing all of these goods, and we also kind of throughout the year we'll do some pop-up events like thrift swaps and the quad throughout the semester and things like that. Nice. Well, you mentioned that the club is pretty small. How does the organization go about managing and completing their goals at this size? Well, we usually have weekly meetings with the exec team to coordinate upcoming events and just communicate all of our updates. So the co-directors do a lot of the heavy lifting, and they mainly kind of plan the big stuff, and then they delegate tasks to the four other committees, which are sustainability, collections, events, and multimedia. And also this year we just started using Trello, which is like a digital kind of to-do list that's collaborative so everybody can look at it, and I think that's really helped the meetings to be a little less chaotic and helped everybody to know what they're supposed to be doing. So you used this word, less chaotic. If the meetings are less chaotic now since using Trello, how would you describe the environment or the vibe of the meetings now? They're pretty relaxed. I would say that most of the conversation is pretty casual, informal. You know, we're all, like, pretty friendly. But some aspects, I guess, to make the meetings feel a little bit more forced or kind of, like, overly structured, like we usually do icebreakers at the beginnings of every meeting, which I just think are kind of unproductive, in my opinion, and a little bit awkward. What's an example of an icebreaker that might be used at the meeting? The last one I remember was something like, what did you do over holiday break? Or, like, another one might have been, like, what was your favorite memory of this semester, those types of things. So what's an example of something that you might say in response to that icebreaker, or how much detail would you really share with the group? Our after hours would never break, usually. I would just say, like, I hung out with my friends, saw my dogs and my family. I usually say stuff that's pretty, like, short and basic for them. Interesting. So are there some people that may feel a little bit more comfortable during the icebreaker and share a little bit more? I think, yeah, particularly older members of the club or, like, the co-directors. Like, they might say that they went on, like, a specific trip or, like, tell a specific, like, memory or story that happened, things like that, that you should share a little bit more. Okay. So you also mentioned that the meetings consist of breaking out into small groups. Could you give me an example of a conversation you might have within your small group? I'm part of the collections committee, so we might talk about, like, planning a quad collection date and, like, how to coordinate all of our schedules so that someone is there to manage it throughout the day and set up and stuff. Or we also honestly have a lot of free time usually in our groups that ends up getting filled with just, like, random small talk and, like, talking about our classes and stuff. So how would you say this kind of conversation compares to the flow of conversation in the full group? I would say that it definitely is less structured in our small group and sometimes seems a little bit more like a social conversation than a productive one. My roommates and I often tend to get a little off track. Yeah, I gotcha. That can definitely happen when working with a team. Well, thank you for your time and participating in this interview. It's been a massive help. Thanks. I've loved to be welcomed here.