Rewind: The Wednesday That I Skipped

Well, my plan to keep a constant blog has not gone too well so far... Time to get caught up!

In my last post, I summarized a few of the sessions we had and the activities we did during them. However, I did skip Wednesday for a reason. On Wednesday, we did not sit and do sessions all day.... we did something way better. We went on a field trip! I haven't gone on a field trip since maybe sixth grade, and this field trip was awesome. The point? To get to know the city we are serving.

We started off at the Hemming Park, which is a park right in the middle of downtown. It's where Artwalk is held every month, it has a little fountain, sometimes there's a coffee truck, all the trees have been yarn-bombed, there's interactive art everywhere... it's a nice place to just sit and hang out. So Wednesday morning we all met there to do our morning circle with our Crazy Teams. I was a little late because of a hectic roommate ride situation, but everything turned out okay. Thank goodness I had some friends who were willing to pick us up because we may not have made it at all.

After everyone got into their groups and ready to go, we climbed aboard three school buses and headed to our first stop: The Cummer Museum. The Cummer Museum is awesome, that's pretty much the only word I can use to describe it. They have modern art, extremely old collections, a hands-on area that might be designed more for children but I loved it, and they also borrow at least one new exhibit every couple months. This month's exhibit was one by an artist named Whitfield Lovell, called "Deep River."

"Inspired specifically by the legacy of African Americans who fled from slavery, crossing the Tennessee River to freedom during the Civil War, Deep River uses sculpture, video, drawing, sound, and music to create a unique experience that takes visitors on a symbolic journey in search of independence. For Lovell, the river symbolizes the final boundary to freedom. Visitors become engulfed within the river itself, surrounded by projected images of flowing water and the sounds of the environment, moving alongside Lovell’s haunting Conté crayon portraits as companions on the ongoing search for freedom."

The Cummer Museum also has three amazing gardens in three different styles, all of which we were able to explore. Not only were there paths overlooking the water, flowers, fountains, and trees everywhere, but one of the gardens is also home to one of the oldest trees in Jax, an oak tree that is estimated to be between 175 and 200 years old and has a span of 150 feet.

After we had explored most of the museum, we once again got on the buses to go to our next stop. At first glance, it looked like an abandoned warehouse with a bunch of graffiti on the side. We soon learned, however, that it is an extremely prestigious art district called CoRK. On the Corner of Rosselle and King, CoRK is home to the studios of ~70 extremely talented artists. It's apparently very difficult to ever have an in with CoRK - you either need to have a connection or pay a large amount of money for a ticket for a benefit night or something. Evidently we had a connection, because we got a tour and the works. It pretty much just made me jealous because of how talented all of the artists were, and I also enjoyed meeting the few that were working at the time of our visit. We chatted with a  watercolor painter, a photographer, and a metal sculptor, and we also got to see a lot of unfinished pieces that other artists had left lying around.

Once we had toured CoRK, we made our way to Edward Waters College, a HBCU in Jacksonville. While we were there, a man whose full name I cannot remember but everyone called Pedro (pronounced peedro) talked to us about some of the initiatives taken in the more impoverished areas of Jacksonville. He told us stories from his own life, and gave us some suggestions on building relationships with both students and parents/guardians. He also taught us about one of the programs he is a part of that works with families to put a child on a success plan, starting in the womb and ending in college or the work force. Obviously I'm a couple weeks behind in my posts and I don't quite remember all of the things he talked about, but I do know it was very interesting and he was a very well-spoken man.

Upon completing his talk, Pedro then took us on a bus tour of some of the areas from which many of our kids may be coming from. We also stopped at one of the schools where they were having a big science fair type thing. One of the groups was outside shooting off bottle rockets that they made out of PVC pipe, water, and two-liters. It was very entertaining and we all got sprayed with water but they shot off pretty well.

After we shot off those rockets, we went back to the office for a panel. Several members of the community came in and told us what they did and then we had sort of a Q&A session with them. Three out of the four worked in non-profits in the city, and then one worked for the downtown planning/development stuff. They mostly talked about how we could get involved in the community and how valuable our input is, even if we aren't actually from Jax. There are so many awesome things that organizations have available for students, like there is this Thanksgiving service thing where people from all religions and all ways of life come together for one big learning and cultural experience. I will hopefully be able to go to that because it sounds extremely interesting.

Once our day at the office was done, I went to Artwalk with a few of my friends. It was kind of rainy so it wasn't really out to the full extent, but I did buy a succulent in a cool little pot and we also got to listen to some great spoken word.

As you can see, there's a reason I wanted to include Wednesday in a separate post. I only wish I hadn't gotten so far behind... I'll hopefully be able to catch up by the end of this week!!

The Week in Review: The Lessons

This week was crazy, and jam packed, and so full of information and new experiences that I'm going to have to break it up into multiple posts. Maybe I should have written a little each night, but I got way too tired and things just didn't go according to plan. But at least I have good reasons for being too tired! After all, having training for at least eight hours a day kind of wears you out. I did learn a lot of good things, however, so I'll try my best to give a solid overview of this week's activities. This particular post is going to be a long one, but it will cover some of the lessons we spent all week learning. 

Every morning, we have first circle with our crazy groups, as I described in my post on Monday. We do a uniform check, have announcements, express our joys, ripples, and appreciations, and generally get some positive energy going. After first circle, we start all of our day's activities. This is where it gets crazy. Sometimes the corps members break into groups, sometimes we are all together, sometimes we are doing team builders and sometimes we are just sitting and taking notes. And believe me, I've taken a lot of notes this week. 

On Tuesday, we started off with the Executive Director address. We discussed several topics: the difference between complicated and complex, how losing and learning are connected, and why the team model is so critical to how City Year functions. We also contemplated how we each wanted to make a difference this year. In response to that question, I wrote down a couple things. The first was that I want to change lives, whether it's the life of one person or the life of many, it doesn't matter. I just want to make an impact. I also want to encourage young girls to explore the STEM subjects. I don't know how exactly I will complete that goal, but I know that often times, girls are discouraged from doing those subjects due to societal cues. I hope to make girls realize that they can be whatever they want, and there are a lot of options as far as careers go. They don't have to be limited to the english-related subjects.

The next part of the day was my favorite thing we've done so far, an activity called Leadership Compass. The leadership compass is a power tool about diversity and individual work styles, and the goal of the activity is to gain insight on your own styles and strengths. Everyone falls into a category - north, south, east, or west - and each of those categories describes a leadership style.

North is action. A person who is a North jumps right into projects, is assertive, active, and decisive, likes to be in control. They also enjoy challenges, always persevere, and work at a quick pace. However, there are some downsides to being a North. They can overlook strategic planning, easily get defensive, and have black and white views. A common North viewpoint is "if you want something done right, do it yourself."

South is empathy. Souths understand people, always integrates the input of others, and are supportive of colleagues and peers. They also trust others and for Souths, interaction is primary. The downsides to the South style is that they can lose focus on goals, have trouble saying no, and overcompromise to avoid conflict. 

East is vision. They see the big picture, are the creative thinking, idea-oriented people. They also like to experiment and explore and appreciate a lot of information. Easts can lose focus easily, however, and can also have a lack of dependability and attention to detail. Sometime they put too much emphasis on vision rather than action.

West is analysis. Understanding what information is needed, being practical and dependable, and providing planning and resources are all characteristics of Wests. They also look at the critical information, following the procedures and guidelines. That being said, Wests can be stubborn and indecisive, and can often get bogged down with information instead of actually moving forward with a plan.

From this activity, I learned I am a North. I fit many of the characteristics, both the good and the bad. But the goal isn't to be just one direction on the compass. The goal is to learn how to be in the middle, how to take all four directions and combine them into one fluid flow of leadership styles. That is what we are working toward this year, because everyone can always improve on their other directions.

Also on Tuesday, we learned about some parts of City Year culture. There is actually a lot to digest, from the meanings of all the symbols, to power tools, to PITWs, to founding stories, to all the different chants and hand motions and traditions. Everything has a meaning and purpose, and it has all been proven to work. The team leaders and impact people have been breaking up parts of the culture and teaching us a little bit every day. Most of it probably seems a little weird to the outside world, like the "silent applause" or the crazy chants we do, but I am starting to see more and more of what it all actually means.

The rest of Tuesday was broken up into a few more sessions. Inspirational standards covered punctuality, professionalism, and uniform policies. Social Media, as you would expect, covered some of the social media policies. MarComm101, which I think stands for something communication but I am not entirely sure, covered what exactly City Year is trying to do. We also talked more about professionalism and business etiquette. Tuesday was a long day, and not everything was exciting, but it was all stuff we needed to cover.

I'm going to skip Wednesday and cover that in another post.

On Thursday, we did very similar things to Tuesday. We covered AmeriCorps Member Standards and Policies, which was basically all the things we needed to know about our actual term. Each school team has 6-10 members, we have to get CPR certified, there's an Employee Assistance Program if we need it, that sort of stuff. Most of it was covered before, but this was the AmeriCorps official session so they had to cover it again. We also talked about a whole lot of prohibited activities, some obvious (no stealing or having weapons at school) and some were not so obvious (non-displacement and non-duplication). (Side note: this has been a very short version of the actual sessions, these took most of the day).

Also on Thursday, we covered one of the founding ideas of City Year. It's called "Whole School, Whole Child." During our year of service, we will be giving general supports to the whole school, as well as individualized interventions to specific children. In this session, we learned a bit about the different dropout indicators, as well as what we will do to address them. The indicators are as follows: Poor Attendance, Disruptive Behavior, and Course Failure (in math or english). In order to address these problems, we will be creating focus groups of approximately five students, which we will then work with to create individualized plans. We didn't go into a ton of detail, but I am sure that there will be more about it in the weeks to come.

Some of the "whole school" things we will be doing are report card conferencing, family engagement activities, appreciation and recognition days, college and career fairs, and we can even coach a team or start after-school clubs. It is crucial to get the community involved and invested in the education of our students because they need that support system to help them succeed.

Moving quickly into Friday now... today we focused a lot on inclusivity, diversity, and disability. These are all important topics to me personally, and I think they should be to everyone. We did more discussion than notes today, but I did take away a few important things. Diversity is the mix of different people and inclusivity is the involvement of all those people. Our team will not be able to function without all the different perspectives and viewpoints and what have you. We are a group of all directions on the compass, we come from different backgrounds, we are different races and abilities and religions and genders and sexual orientation and are of different socioeconomic status but we are all here for the same reason, and that reason is to serve. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and today we also learned some tools to manage them. We must suspend judgement, develop connections, we must realize what we can and can't control, and we must always assume the best. If we want to truly make a difference in the lives of our kids, we must be our best at all times. Today was important, it covered a lot of things that needed to be said and will continue to be reinforced.

It has been a long week, as you can see by the length of this post, and I didn't even include the cultural and community activities we did. I'll write that tomorrow, and if you're still even reading this, I apologize for where it may have been sloppy or not worded well. Quite frankly, I'm exhausted; not the bad kind but the satisfied kind, the kind where you know you're doing something great.

First Day of Training

So today was our first day of training! We jumped straight into service and met at 5 different locations throughout Jacksonville. I was at a place called Rethreaded, which I described in my last post, and I spent the entire morning gardening and doing general busywork to set up for their 4th birthday celebration. We got to work with some of the women who actually benefit from Rethreaded's services which was an amazing experience because we got to see firsthand who we were serving. Currently, Rethreaded employs 13 women who have escaped some part of the sex trade. One of the women, Cassandra, talked to a group of us as we sat helping her tie elastic bands onto tags for her to stick on products. She was such a happy person, cracking jokes and talking to us and, although I was not part of the conversation, it is my understanding that she talked to a couple of the other corps members about some more personal parts of her life and how Rethreaded has helped her. My favorite interaction with her was when another corps member was cleaning spiderwebs off the ceiling above us and said there was a big spider up there, and Cassandra freaked out and ran away and called the manager over because she was so scared of this spider falling on her head (and before you think I'm sitting here making fun of someone's fear, everyone - including Cassandra - was laughing about it).

After our morning service, we had an hour lunch break, and then we headed to City Year headquarters for an afternoon of training. When we got there, we got sorted into what's called our "Crazy Team," which is basically like our home base and the team we will be working with throughout all of training. They won't necessarily be placed at the same school as us, but we can also count on our Crazy Team for support throughout the whole year. Each Crazy Team has a name and theme, and I am a part of the "It Takes A Village" team, which is based off the saying "it takes a village to raise a child."

In our Crazy Teams, we did a lot of team building activities and icebreakers, and then we had a social justice discussion. Social justice is apparently going to be one of the focuses of CYJax this year. Before we discussed different topics, however, we made a norms list, which included things such as "everyone has good intentions" and "always keep an open heart and open mind." Admittedly, I can't remember the actual questions we discussed this afternoon, but in my defense they were pretty wordy and we talked about a lot of different things today. I do know that it was great to hear opinions from a very diverse group of people and to see that there are so many different perspectives to view issues from.

After we finished our discussion, we had a group project/competition: each Crazy Team had to come up with a machine that would solve a social injustice in the country. My team unanimously decided to tackle the problem of homelessness, and our "machine" was to take foreclosed homes and turn them into houses available for the homeless. Of course, there's a lot that would go into it, but our main points were that it would be more cost effective to put the homeless in foreclosed houses than in prison (which is where many homeless people end up), tax money could be rerouted to support the program, the homeless who took advantage of the housing would then have a permanent address and therefore be more appealing for jobs, and more points such as those. I personally think that it was a pretty good plan - maybe not so easy to actually carry out, but a good plan nonetheless. Most other groups tried to solve the hunger crisis, and there were many plans for futuristic food-transporting machines and other cool things such as that.

All in all it was a really fun/educational/inspiring day. There was a lot of great discussion and it just amazes me how many different but great personalities everyone has, and how EVERYONE has something to bring to the table because we all come from such different situations. Some people are more vocal than others, as with any group, but the people that put themselves out there and talked in front of the group today really made me realize how much more I have to learn. As my Crazy Team leader told us, the point of this training is to make us uncomfortable, because being uncomfortable is when you start to grow.

Registration Day

For those of you who don't know what I'm doing, I got accepted into an awesome program called City Year. City Year is a branch of the AmeriCorps National Service Network, and corps members (volunteers) have to complete an application, go through a series of interviews, and get accepted in order to be placed at one of 26 locations throughout the US. City Year Corps Members volunteer in schools within high-poverty communities, doing jobs such as teaching, tutoring, campus beautification, coordinating after-school activities, etc. As an applicant begins the process of applying, an option pops up to either select the location one wishes to be placed, or to "serve where most needed." When I was applying, I selected "serve where most needed," and that's how I ended up in Jacksonville, where I will be working in the Duval County Public School System.

Right now, none of the corps members in Jax know what school we will be placed at. Jacksonville has ten options, and I could end up at an elementary, middle, high, or special education school. I will get placed on my school team in a couple weeks, after training officially starts and the program directors are able to split up teams based on the different strengths and weaknesses of each individual. There should be about ten volunteers at each school, as City Year Jacksonville has 100 members.

Before training is able to start, every corps member has to go through a registration process. I had my registration day on Wednesday. I had to bring all my official documents, have them scanned and verified, and sit through a couple information sessions regarding the guidelines and expectations of being a corps member. Most of it was information we had been given before, but it was good to get refreshers and have the chance to ask questions.

At the registration day, we were also given the location of where we will begin our training on Monday. This is the part I didn't expect: instead of being a formal sit-down training session where all members are together, we are being split into groups and immediately beginning volunteer work! There is a group serving breakfast to the homeless, a group working a food bank, there are several groups doing outdoor stuff, and the group I got placed in is cleaning up and indoor/outdoor community center to prepare for an event. Just hearing that much, I thought it was cool but partly wished I had been placed into a group that was actually working with the people of Jax. That was until a group of us found a poster for the event that we are setting up for. It's for an organization called Rethreaded (a link to their website can be found here), and this is their mission statement:

"Rethreaded is a social entrepreneurship that is breaking the cycle of the sex trade by offering viable and creative work to those affected by the sex trade (i.e. human trafficking prostitution, drug addiction, pornography and strip clubs).

Our vision is to unravel the effects of the sex trade by fighting business with business on a global and local level.  The multibillion dollar sex industry is founded on the exploitation of mostly women and children. As a business we want to provide safe, viable, and dignity-giving work to survivors of the sex trade allowing them to be who they were created to be."

This is an awesome project, in my opinion, and I'm very excited to start work on Monday knowing that what I'm doing is going to a great cause. There will also be formal training mixed in to the volunteering we will be doing, but I'm hoping that we will continue to do cool projects like this one!

My First Few Days

Over the past few days, every single thing in my life has changed. That may seem a bit drastic but it's true: I packed up almost everything I own, drove 1200 miles from Michigan to Florida, moved into a new home with new roommates, and started a new job. Every day I'm doing things I've never done before, and many people encouraged me to start a blog to document my year... I've never blogged before, if you haven't gathered that much already, so these first few posts may be a little rough. But here goes!

The days leading up to my departure from Spring Lake were extremely hectic. My parents were at band camp and I was still working full time, so trying to pack up everything and still have time to spend with friends was difficult. Naturally I chose friends over packing more times than I probably should have, and my parents expected me to be packed by the time they got home, so I ended up cramming almost all of my packing into Thursday night. I think I did pretty well, considering how fast I had to do it. Four crates full of stuff, along with a couple more backpacks, and I was good to go (I actually started off with three crates and a lot of extra small things but my dad figured out how to get everything into four). I spent all of Saturday loading up the car and saying goodbyes, and then my parents and I took off at 4 am on Sunday.

We drove 17ish hours to my new home, and spent the next couple days on a cycle of sleep, hit every thrift shop possible, repeat. And by "every thrift shop possible", I mean at least twelve a day, even going to a couple of the same ones multiple times a day. The thrift shop scene down here is awesome, by the way. They're all extremely well organized and many are absolutely gigantic, getting tons of new stuff every day. When I got down here, all I had was a desk, but thanks to the thrift shops I now have a bed, dresser, side table, office chair, lamp, several pieces of artwork, a bunch of kitchen stuff,  and a cool new papasan chair.

So, to make a long story short, my parents and I spent the first few days of my new life in Jax buying everything I might possibly need over the next year, and writing a list of all the things I forgot to pack that they will have to mail to me. My parents left early Thursday morning, and here I am, living on my own and doing cool adult things like cooking and blogging and forgetting to drink water. My roommates are cool, I joined a gym, we're hosting a potluck tonight, I'm almost completely unpacked, I had my first day of work stuff and met a lot of cool people... things are looking pretty good so far.