One Spark 2015- The life of the Crowd Funding Festival Volunteer

This is the third year that the world's largest crowd-funding festival happened in downtown Jacksonville. Helped run by event director and UNF alumnus, Brent Fine, this start-up company is all about showcasing the best and the brightest in the areas of education, music, technology, social good and health/science. The festival ended today and the winners were announced on social media. I was not able to attend the event the first two years and so I wanted to make sure I understood what all the fuss was about this year. I went to the website, BeOneSpark.com, and found out how to sign up as a volunteer. I decided to be a "creator liasion" and went to the training. My job duties included helping the creators, or contest participants, with whatever issues they may have throughout the five-day festival. It was enjoyable but also tiring to walk for 3 1/2 hours each day and talk to each booth in my designated area. On the last day I volunteered, I was able to help with the 5K in the morning and in the afternoon, help visitors that wanted to vote but needed assistance. More than 50,000 votes were cast and funding goes on for 30 days after the festival. The mobile app worked for most people, but I was surprised at how many people either didn't have a smart phone, didn't want to use space to (temporarily) download the app, or hadn't done updates for the app to work. If this was a true-to-life sampling of the population, I feel safe saying that smart phone users are not as prevalent as we think. Or, at least, not as proficient as we may believe!

Networking speed-dating style

I was able to attend the Mentoring Monday Women in Business event hosted by the Jacksonville Business Journal. It was at 7 a.m. at the Schultzbacher Professional Development Center. I met some interesting and professional women. After eating breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon and hashbrowns, we watched a broadcast from the head of the Women's BizJournals that let us know that more than 10,000 women were participating in these Mentoring Monday events around the United States. We then moved to the networking portion where we got a list of the registered mentors and chose which ones we wanted to meet. We got seven minutes per conversation and I chose to talk to the head of the City Rescue Mission and the head of Broadbased Communications. They were both very gracious and helpful as we discussed internship possibilities. Before I left, I talked with the event coordinator and the editor of the JBJ about their company and a future internship possibility. It was a great event and well worth it.