Colton Hairston

Hello my name is Colton Hairston. When I first pictured myself at One Stone I expected myself to be helping out the community, becoming a better leader, and just overall a better person. But now that I'm here, I find myself working on these topics every day. For example: a few months ago X-Lab started to brainstorm different ways that Covid might be impacting younger members of our community. We came up with a big list of potential projects to work on, and eventually find a solution to. But one that kept coming up was Halloween. When we started to list out reasons why Halloween was so important to us, we realized why. When you are young, really all you want is the freedom to do what you want. And Halloween becomes one of the few days out of the year that that dream is really fulfilled. After this came up, it wasn't hard to decide on which problem to fix. But we couldn't stop just there. We set out to really gain some insight from our target audience. I did this by managing to schedule an empathy interview with Foothills School of Arts and Sciences 5th and 6th grade class. I expected it to be difficult for these younger kids to want to talk about Halloween to some random high school student. But after the first question, which was “What are some things you guys like about Halloween?”, most of the class had their hands raised and wanted to share different stories about the holiday. Low and behold the majority of the answers (other than candy) were getting to run off from their parents, and just have fun with their friends. I even got some answers that ended with “that's why Halloween is my favorite holiday.” Our project ended up being a huge Halloween event full of mini games. Families would start at the entrance of the One Stone parking lot and make their way through the activities winning candy and prizes the whole way through! Looking back onto it, this project gave invaluable insight on not only how to work with kids but also how good it feels to help out the community, even if it's just making sure no one misses out on an awesome Halloween experience.