National Endowment for Arts.

Introduction
The Big Read is a plan by the National Endowment for Arts. It is a program that broadens peoples’ understanding of the world, our communities, and us through the joy of sharing a good book. Through this project, communities come together to read, discuss and enjoy world literature (Big Read, 2015). It has a stout website that provides comprehensive information on authors and their works in the Books and guides section of its website. Managed by Arts Midwest, this initiative gets objected to the offering of grants to the innovative community through offering reading programs just around a single book. Apparently, the Big Read project has been broken up into four sections (Big Read, 2015). The current section is the sharing the organizations we are or attempting to partner that can provide us support to promote the Big Read.
Minnetrista is one of the many community organizations that we as a group aspire to partner. This organization gets located in Indiana and serves and strives to be “a gathering place that focuses on exploring nature, history, gardens, and art. It also focuses on gaining the honor of their audience inspiring them through experience and heritage future of our region (Mann, 2015).
Another organization we attempt to reach out to is the Books-A-Million. Our organization has originally viewed Books-A-Million Inc. (BAM) as a possible organizational partner in our immersive project for the following simple reason. It is t a bookstore that has shown a vested interested in reading. A good research of the company brings us to ascertainment that this is a competitive bookstore of history (Tomkins, 2005). The company got established in 1917 and for the past twenty years, it has diversified its delivery methods, a step that has spurred its competitiveness in the electronic world. Lastly, we reached out to Central High School’s English department. Since this department will host the Keynote Address for Muncie, we feel that our theme will stimulate conversation with high school students since they have never lived in the world without the Internet.
Organizational Structures and Management Features
Minnetrista
The primary reason for reaching out to Minnetrista is because its vision, mission, and values were very similar to those of ours. Similar to Big Read, this entity values building better communities, exploration, and values diversity perspectives. Besides, Minnetrista is a well-known, well-respected charitable organization (Mann, 2015). The organization gets reigned by a board of community leaders merged from seven counties across East Central Indiana. It gets committed to life-long learning and exploration that makes it an invaluable resource within the adult and community education circle. Big Read and Minnetrista share a similar purpose that is to educate and inspire growth. Besides, they cater to a similar audience (Mann, 2015).
Books-A-Million Inc. (BAM)
We chose to reach out to BAM because they have grown to become the premier book retailing chain in the Southeastern United States. Secondly, it is the second largest book retailer in the nation having more than 260 stores in 32 states (BAM, 2002). It has a retail component, book wholesalers and distribution subsidiary and an Internet development and services company (NetCentral). The corporate size of BAM added to its decentralization makes it a complex organization. Worren (2012) defines a complex organization like an organization that is large and structurally differentiated that a single individual cannot effectively manage it. The Company provides consumer goods and services that contribute to the material well-being of the society
Central high school
We chose to reach out to the Central High School because it appeared relevant to our theme, Electronic Book Burning. We approached the English Chairperson, Stephen Merkle and established that high school students rely on the Internet for almost all of their learning needs. High school students today receive a tablet for their classroom readings and research. In fact, for the most part, they no longer utilize the library unless it’s through accessing books and articles electronically. In Central, our interest was to establish how high school students see hard copy books. Do they consider them as any valuable? Secondly, our mission continued to other schools including Muncie Community Schools. Here, its aim being to provide a quality educational environment. That is one which allows every student to increase his or her potential and, after graduation, have the vital skills necessary to be a positive, productive and contributing member of society (Tomkins, 2005).
Based on the visit, we identified that adult and community education in that it provides an opportunity for them to acquire skills of identifying resources to improve themselves and the community (Tomkins, 2005).
We decided to compare our organizations by using Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s, Competing Values Framework: Four Models of Organization Effectiveness. These models enabled us identify the underlying similarities and find underlying dimensions of effectiveness reflecting on competing management values in organizations.

Looking at the Human Relations Model, it appears that employees are given opportunities for autonomy and development. Here, the management works toward sub-goals of cohesion, morale, and training opportunities. Organizations using this model get characterized by more concern with employees than with the environment. In the Open Systems Model, similar to the Systems Resource Model, there is a conjunction of a flexibility and external focus. Management’s goals are mainly growth and resource acquisition. The goals of these models include flexibility, readiness, and positive evaluation of the external environment. That implies that the dominant value of this model is to establish a good relationship with the external environment and acquire resources.
On the other hand, the Internal Process Model reflects the values of internal focus and structural control. It gets characterized by a stable organization setting that maintains itself in an orderly way and is comfortable with their environmental status. The Rational Goal Model reflects management values of structural control and external focus. The primary goals of management which applied this model are productivity, efficiency, and profit. That is, they want to achieve output goals in a controlled manner.
Based on the Four Models of Organization Effectiveness and the research we did on the BAM in preparation to proposing a partnership, we believe their organization effectiveness model to be the Rational Goal Model (BAM, 2015). The reason for our belief is that they emphasize planning and goal setting to achieve their organizational efficiently. They coordinate and control work activities through direct supervision in the stores and use legal compliance as their motivational strategy. Secondly, we believe Minnetrista uses the Human Relations Model because they are facilitators of training opportunities, cohesion, morale, meeting locations, community value orientated and diverse perspectives in Muncie (Mann, 2015). They have a small number of employees, and mostly use the help of volunteers. They also value the benefit they provide the community.
Analyzing the Muncie School System, we found that it has nine elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school. The administration office consists of sixteen officers, in addition to the superintendent. It has an elected five-member Board of Trustees and can be considered a bureaucratic organization that has a distinct hierarchy of authority. A deeper scrutiny leads us to conclude that they operate under a combination of the Human Relations Model and the Open Systems Model (Syna & Palgi, 2011). Their goals include flexibility, readiness, and positive evaluation of the external environment. We give a recommendation that Muncie schools require a competent and dedicated workforce that can drive the students to acquire the best education possible.
Actions
As of today, we have been unsuccessful finding a definite partner. Once identified a definite partner, we shall share the partner’s name and their workshop facility location. In that sense, our goal is that we shall have identified a partner and their venue and finalized our partnership details. Our attempt to partner with Central High School has currently been found infeasible, and thus we will focus on finding another organization although we felt that the age group should be including in our organizational paper. Nevertheless, we are left with two options that we endeavor to follow-up (Minnetrista and BAM), no matter how many times as it takes to get an answer from both or either.
The Big Read and our group feel that we can utilize these organizations in the many ways. The primary one is that we will share, promote and broaden our understanding of the world, the communities, and ourselves just by sharing a good book. We hope that BAM will partner with us because they have done a lot for the community. For instance, BAM has provided customers a way to send books to U.S. troops through their Books for Troops program for years. They are a generous organization that has distributed over 35,000 books to troops around the world over the last year (BAM, 2015). Recently, they have expanded the successful program to include veterans and troops in military hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and retirement communities. They provide children of military service members through the Reach Out and Read® Military Initiative (BAM, 2015).
We will thus endeavor to persuade the BAM and Minnetrista to work with us since we have a lot in common and together can earn our objectives and drive them to the far end (Syna & Palgi, 2011). We propose that they join us in using the big read discussion as a platform to engage local people into the conversations about how to improve the community. Secondly, we propose an integration of the reading activities which will work for the better of our organizations and other beneficiaries such as students (Syna & Palgi, 2011).
Reflection
Apparently, this has been a difficult assignment for our group. Though we did a lot of work up front even before the group plan, we still felt it important to make sure we have a theme in place before we approach our potential partnering organizations (Syna & Palgi, 2011). Amongst our activities, was contacting as many individuals who have led or been involved in immersive projects as we could to make them know of our intentions. Even though the Big Read is a wonderful initiative, we endeavor to be able to benefit them rather than only us benefiting from them (Mirvis, 2013). Since the beginning of the semester, our group has met a minimum of 2 hours outside of class when we e-mail each other, sharing gathered information from an informational resource or an organizational resource and possible partner. We also have found that this type of project requires a lot of dedication, and as we go, forward we bid to increase the frequency of our meeting times, at least increase by 2.

References
BAM.(2015).Books for Troops.

Big Read.(2015). About The Big Read.

Mann A.(2015). About Minnetrista.

Syna, D., & Palgi, M. (2011). The paradox of a partnership: The role of conflict in Building partnerships. Miami, FL: Bentham Books.

Tomkins J. (2005). Organization theory and public management. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.

Worren, M. (2012). Organisation design: Re-defining complex systems. Harlow, England: Pearson.

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