MHP = Team Awesome

If we could summarize our house execution of monthly programming into three areas they would be "collaboration," "coordination," and "planning ahead." Moishe House Philadelphia prides ourselves on weekly meetings and how we utilize the full extent of Google Documents in order to plan our events. Let's break down the three areas to really understand how everything gets done.

COLLABORATION: Every aspect of MHP events are decided together. We have weekly meetings every Tuesday evening wherein we discuss the ups and downs of events from the previous week, finalize plans for the next week's events, and look forward to the rest of the month and long-term events before getting into anything else we, as a group, decide we need to talk about. We send out an agenda email every week in preparation for this meeting so the agenda is known and can be added to or commented on as well. All these plans are discussed to their fullest extent and then notes of the meeting are placed in our MHP email account as a separate Google Doc. Even if someone cannot attend this meeting, they are still able to voice their opinion via email ahead of time and keep track of discussions/decisions via the notes. We keep our meetings capped at an hour long, in order to maintain a balance between Moishe House and the rest of our busy lives.

COORDINATION: It is important that we take into consideration our own schedules as well as those of the local community when planning our monthly calendar. We are well connected with the other Graduate and Professional organizations around Philadelphia so that we know their schedules and they know ours. With this knowledge, and by posting our own individual calendars on our shared Google Calendar, we are able to make sure not to conflict too much with other things going on. Sometimes it gets difficult if two of our members are gone, but usually we know about absenses far enough in advance that we are able to plan ahead of time for any issues that may come up. Sharing this information has proved crucial to our success.

PLANNING AHEAD: We are very busy people, as most MH house members probably are, so it is critical that we think about our schedules in advance and are able to take into account all of our desires/plans when finalizing the event calendar. For this reason we try to have at least a skeleton schedule of a particular month by the beginning of the previous one (i.e. we have an idea of what to do for September by August 1). Then, we discuss the events during August and finalize plans so we can post everything a couple of weeks ahead. This may not always work with our plans, but at least the attempt gives us time to contact community members who want to be involved, ensure we are preparing better-quality events with more prep time, and know who is going to be around.


That's the basic essence of what we do here at MHP. We think we have created an organized vision of how MHP works in Philadelphia and look forward to continuing this year.