WHAT MATTERS TO ME AND WHY happens at many campuses around the country... it's been going on for decades and is one of the most successful programs in religious life in the US, attracting students, faculty, and staff.  Consider starting one at your campus!  (For further coaching on how to do it, contact us.)

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Each event (often held monthly) invites a different faculty or staff member to share about their personal lives and journeys - not focusing primarily on their academic/professional stories, but their own life stories.  This can take a bit of "coaching" to get them to speak at a very different level than how they do in the classroom.  Magic happens in these WMTMAW events - as students and staff and faculty discover unknown dimensions of familiar figures on campus.

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Often, WMTMAW is held for an hour at noon, mid-week, with a simple free meal served.  The speaker talks for about 20-25 minutes, with the rest of the time devoted to moderated Q and A. 

 

Most WMTMAW programs happen on private campuses and are sponsored by the university-paid religious life offices.  But there's absolutely no reason you can't do it in your roles in campus ministry at any college or university!  We strongly recommend that you work very closely with friendly offices on campus that can help you facilitate the series.  And that you get lots of input and buy-in from professors and staffers.  You might assemble a small team of faculty and staff and students just for the purpose of running the series and choosing speakers.  We suggest you act as the host, but that the series has a quasi-independent structure, to make it clear that it has no specifically religious/sectarian agenda.

 

The initial work to start it might take a bunch of time and energy, but once it gets rolling, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the enthusiasm it generates, and how it becomes a campus "habit" that carries on indefinitely.  It will certainly earn you friends with your campus administration!  -- and position you clearly as an ally of the secular mission of the university, in a time when that mission is under attack by right-wingers and fundamentalists.

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(For an example, have a look at the WMTMAW program at the University of Southern California)

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