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.