St. Cecilia High School seniors, Claire Redinger and Mary O’Keeffe, qualified and competed at the National Leadership Conference (NLC) for Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) this previous summer 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia. The girls competed in the event Publication Design, which consisted of creating a marketing design for a brochure, poster, coupon, and newspaper ad based on a previously given prompt.
The prompt last year was a gluten-free restaurant. Their design had to include fictitious information about the location of the restaurant, the staff, and the menu. Claire and Mary also had to invent a name for their restaurant and create a logo to put on all pieces of the project. While googling, “weird facts about grain” for inspiration (this really happened), the girls stumbled across the name Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain. The girls jokingly refer to this find as “divine intervention” because CERES became the name and inspiration of their restaurant. The girls embraced this Roman theme wholeheartedly, creating a menu that was not only gluten-free, but Mediterranean as well.
To design their pieces for this project they used canva.com and Microsoft Publisher. The girls pulled inspiration from all over to create the design. Chinese lanterns became the base of their logo. They even threw in some rock ’n roll flare, using a Rolling Stones concert advertisement as a basis for their poster structure. Claire and Mary also made a die-cut brochure instead of a tri-fold, to give their project a creative edge on the competition.
The girls submitted their project electronically prior to the State Leadership Conference April 9-11, 2016. The project was then judged and the top ten teams were announced and called to stage on the final day of the conference; however, only the top three of these teams would qualify for the NLC. The girls took first place and earned a ticket to Atlanta!
Throughout the summer Claire and Mary worked hard on their project. Along with perfecting their design pieces, they also prepared a 7- to10-minute presentation about their design. At NLC the girls presented in front of three judges for preliminary rounds, competing against over 150 teams nationwide. They then waited over 12 hours to see if they qualified for finals the next morning. The girls were ecstatic to learn that they were advancing to the finals round as one of the top 15 teams in the nation. The next day they presented again before judges, as well as an audience. On the final day of the conference the Awards of Excellence program took place. Events were announced alphabetically, so Claire and Mary waited anxiously for over two hours to hear their names called with the other top ten teams in Publication Design. The girls were overjoyed when they took 10th place, earning two trophies.
While in Atlanta, Claire and Mary also toured CNN, visited the birthplace and church of Martin Luther King, Jr., and went to an Atlanta Braves baseball game. Josh Hinrichs, a St. Cecilia High School alumnus, chaperoned the girls along with his students from Lincoln Southwest High School. The girls say that this project exceeded all the goals they had set for themselves. Claire and Mary are very honored to have exemplified the St. Cecilia motto of “All Glory to God” at the national conference. They are very thankful to everyone who made this trip possible.
