Some more complications?

Today I received a phone call from our RWR chair who just got back from New York. I caught her up on some of the happenings, and how Diane and I did not know what to do regarding getting the schools to participate (that was her area of expertise but we weren't given much instruction on what to do). She will be going in tomorrow morning to finish that piece up.

I have finalized most of our vendors for goody bags, and will hopefully be getting that ready to go. Many people have not gotten back to me (particularly Cornerstone), so I will be making one final call to vendors.

We are also having some more complications with our website and registration. The person in charge of our website has been keeping a track of all the lists and registrations that come through our website (including just team registrations). This means that some are not actual pre-registrations. Therefore, I only have 141 pre-registered whereas she says she has 200. WRONG! Now, I get to email all the people that I do not have a shirt size for telling them to please give me a shirt size because they are considered pre-registered. It has been determined that we really need to sit down with her and make sure that we are on the same page.

We are one month out! Don't forget to sign up if you will be in Mac on June 16th!

Almost done!

This week at CASA I received and processed court documents into our system as usual.  I also helped prepare some training material and helped Amy re-create a "Yamhill County Court Timeline" sheet for the new volunteers.  I then made name cards for the each member of the Oregon CASA Network as they will be having a meeting this weekend.  I continued my work in consolidating cases in our filing cabinet to open up more space.  Overall, it was a pretty simple week at the office.  Next Thursday will be my last day there.

-Mica

Back to some clerical work

This week at CASA I mostly did clerical work and processing court papers into our system.  I finished folding and labeling newsletters to be sent out sometime this week... all 800 or so!

I also started a project getting rid of some documents in each child's folder in order to free up space in the cabinet.  

Our cabinet that holds each child's case is really full and so Amy showed me documents that could be shredded since some of them were already saved on a disc.  This project took all day and next week I'll probably move on to re labeling the folders.

That's it for this week. 

Chinese in the Basement

On Thursday I got the opportunity to visit the basement where the Chinese men lived in in the early 1900s. I've heard about this mysterious basement and have been trying to figure out how to get down there (see my last blog entry for the entire story) and I fortunately got the chance to get down there. It very awe-striking! Who would have guessed there is this mini-hostel like space down in the basement of one of the buildings on 3rd Street. I definitely got goosebumps during the tour. It's really dark down there and a good amount of the artifacts are original items the Chinese left behind.

Getting a chance to talk to Matt was great too. He and his wife have been reconstructing the place in hope of getting it back to it's original condition. They have done a lot of research and have been working really hard. Currently, they are unable to open it up for tours, but hopefully they will be able to.

 

I tried to be artsy when I was taking the photos and decided not to use flash on a lot of them, and unfortunately they came out a tab bit blurry. But I think they do a good job capturing the eariness I felt down there.

Almost done

I am currently at the very last stage of my internship that is also the most crucial: completing the profiles for each home! I am still waiting to get a few more materials from the adult care homes to put on their profile, which is why this has been so slow. Luckily, this process is a bit more enjoyable as compared to working on transcriptions, so I'm hoping it will go fast. Once this is complete, I will be sending over the files of each home's profile to my supervisor to have her look over them, and once she approves, that will mark the official end of my internship. Looking forward to completing something that I've worked on for four months!

Wrapping up

At this point my powerpoint is as complete as it can be. Unfortunately I have still not received a response back from CTGR or cultural relations as far as getting pictures. I have taken what I can from reliable sites, but I do not want to assume that any picture is credible and have it actually not be associated with the tribes. I have also utilized their website so that I can have links from the powerpoint to their page.

Just working on the final reflection piece and other than that it looks like I am just about finished. Wish the rest of you the best of luck!

Workload took a dive

Hello!

So, this week I helped Amy get materials ready for Volunteer Training that will be happening starting this upcoming Monday.  I pretty much just made copies all day to ensure she had all the handouts for each chapter of their training.

I'll just be going back to data entry and helping out with clerical stuff, which I'm fine with.  Amy said there wasn't much more to do for me as far as projects go, but she did say that she might need help on a director training manual she was in charge of creating for Oregon.  Other than that I'm slowly working towards sending out the CASA newsletter and I'll probably continue doing that next Monday since there are hundreds of them to fold and label.

Overall, the workload has definitely slowed down now that the big event is over, so the next couple weeks will just be clerical work.

-Mica

Powerpoint Complete!

At this point I have the powerpoint finished (excluding some minor details). I am still waiting to receive pictures from the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, but have done my best to insert those which I know to be credible.

Hope everyone is getting closer to finishing their projects and enjoying these last few weeks of the semester!

I Finally Did It!

Remember how I was talking about how I was so scared to ask people for donations in our last meeting. Well, guess what? I did it!

I asked everyone on my list for donations (or at least called them). I got a lot of, "Can you please call back?" or "My manager is not in right now, can he/she call you back?" but I also got a lot of yes's.

La Bella Casa has volunteered to offer coupons. So has some massage therapists :). Also, Mission Foods is donating bags of chips! Now, I just need to follow up with those people who haven't gotten back to me. I have decided to give them another ring on Friday to follow up if I haven't heard back from anyone.

We have also finalized our brochure and will be printing them in house this week and passing them out. Also, be on the lookout for our banner going up soon. I will be dropping it off to the fire department today. Think of me when you see it hanging on Third St.

Auction was a Success!

As you're probably aware, this last Saturday was the auction and what a success!  

We had 140 guests and raised $30,000, which is the most they've raised in this event.  

I of course helped set-up and tear-down, but it was nice seeing everyone in high spirits and excited for the event.

It was great to see all our hard work coming together in one night.  And it was especially nice for me to see my video being played at the event and just knowing the impact it was going to make for those watching it.

Overall, it was a great experience.  I've never been to an auction before, but I helped our emcee during the live auction and it was a lot of fun.

Later in the week I helped Amy put away the supplies we used during the auction and send out thank-you notes to those who donated money.  It took all day since I had to hand write these notes, but they deserve a thank you!

On Monday Amy and I are going to talk about what I'll be doing for the next couple of weeks that are left.  She's thinking I'll help with volunteer training, but we're supposed to talk about it on Monday.

It looks like my internship is coming to a close!  I'm just glad the auction was a success.

-Mica 

Done with transcriptions!

After two weeks, I am finally done with transcriptions. Now comes the fun/unfamiliar process of creating a profile of the adult foster care homes. I have emailed my site supervisor several times now to set up a meeting time so we can talk about the formatting of the portfolio, but she has yet to get back to me on a solid time she would be available. So for now, I am alone on figuring out the portfolio. I'm also realizing that the final banquet is coming up soon, 3 more weeks! So I really don't have much time left to get everything together. I am hoping to find somebody who I can run my ideas through and who can give me a few suggestions. I guess we'll see how this goes.

Louie Loy

Went back to the Yamhill Historical Society this morning and learned about Louie Loy. The first time I went, all we found was one small yellow folder on Chinese men in Yamhill County. This morning I happened to meet a volunteer who is currently doing research on very a important man, Louie Loy, also known as the "Chineseman." The society is trying to find where he was buried so that they can place a tombstone over it.

Still having no luck finding out about policies prohibiting Chinese men from owning and living within McMinnville city limits. But I think I may be getting closer to finding more about it. I finally set up an appointment with the owner of the building Chinese men lived in the basement of in the early 1900s. I'll be sure to blog about my experience down there :)

Just goin with it

As I mentioned in this week's meeting, I have come to a bit of a standstill as far as communication with the Tribes. I have sent e-mails to Mr. Thorsgard in an attempt to set up additional meetings, as well as an e-mail to Mrs. Brown in order to gain access to some photos. Mr. Thorsgard has yet to respond and I did receive a response from Mrs. Brown. However, in order to gain access to the photo there is compensation required---depending on the amount I might be able to include them with my presentation.

At this point I have taken the initiative to just continue on with the project at my own pace. I'm about 3/4 of the way done with my PowerPoint and hopefully as I draw near the end I will receive a response from Mr. Thorsgard. I would really like to run it through him to make sure I am not forgetting/misinterpreting any information, but in the same breath I cannot continue to wait for I might just run out of time.

Hope everyone else is having success with their projects!

The Week of the Auction!

Hello!

So, this week I was able to finalize and present my video to my supervisor, Amy.  I'm really excited to show it at the auction on Saturday.

This week has just been so busy at the office.  I helped Amy check-off her list of to-do's, which meant working on 10 individual projects all day on Wednesday.  These projects were minor, yet were things that

I'm just really excited for this Saturday.  I'm excited to see all these people who are trying to support this great non-profit organization and I really hope it runs smoothly.

I'll be there to help set-up on Saturday as well as carry out my assignments throughout the event with the auction and bidding.

Overall, since I was in charge of advertising I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to hear we only had 120 guests.  Our maximum was 160, so I was hoping to get at least 140, but maybe more people will register between now and Saturday.

For now, I'm just looking forward to the auction! Wish us luck!

This Week in the World of Event Planning

As you all heard after yesterday's class, I have a fear of asking people for donations, which is pretty much my job as of now at this moment of the event. I have spoken to Harvest Fresh and Betty Lou's who have agreed to provide fruit and energy bars on the day of the event. I still have a long list to go through (probably more than 10), so I will be pumping myself up for that!

Diane, our supervisor, has contacted her friends who are massage therapists who think it will be a great idea to have a vendor station open while supplying out first 200 preregistered participants with 10% off coupons! Hopefully other vendors are as generous as they are. I mean, why wouldn't they be? They have participated with us before...

We have also decided on prizes for the different age brackets. We will be giving an RWR poster with their time on it along with a first place, second place, or third place ribbon attached to the corner. We have decided to decrease the amount of age brackets we have so they now include:

14-19

20-29

30-39

40-49

50-59

60+

This number should also help keep our awards show on task. I wonder if we can get a podium donated?? Hmmm....

We have had some issues with the website. On it, when you register, it was giving people the option to not process their payments now. I have about 10 people that have not processed their payments, and now I have to go hunt them down and get their money! We decided that we would not allow them to be considered for preregistration until they pay and we were able to fix that option to just a "Yes" on our website. Phew!

I have also been looking for volunteers to help place yard signs at the beginning of May. I will be asking my sorority, but if any of you know of people that need some community service or want to help, please let me know! The busy month is just around the corner...I hope I can keep up!

Another Week of Video Editing

Hello,

This week wasn't very eventful and the work was similar to last week.  I spent a lot of time in the FDL room at the library editing the CASA auction video.  I definitely had to use a lot of patience and adjust my expectations to what I was actually able to do. Yesterday, I finally finished what I hope is the final edit to the video.

Next Saturday is the auction and it's crazy to think how fast its come.  I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do this week since I've already worked to advertise for the event and it's so close that I can't really start a new advertising idea, so I think I'll start preparing thank-you cards for those who've helped me advertise this event.

I'm really excited for the auction and can't wait to see the fruits of all our labor paying off :)

Trying to make sense of it all

At this point I am trying to sort my way through all of the documents I have been provided with. There are several different records of history for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, slightly contradicting in a few places which makes it a little difficult.

I'm a bit torn because I know that the tribes were hoping that I could tell the whole story, as they see that is the only way to tell the story, but I just do not have the time. Additionally, the project is trying to get snapshots from a 100 years ago versus today, not the entire 150 years of tribal history :-(. Given that I plan to try and illustrate what life was like approximately 100 years ago with the relocation and lifestyle. I'm hoping to get not only pictures, but recordings of tribal elders that tell what life was like. I will also focus on two main time periods that lead to restoration. Finally, I will end with what life looks like today for the tribes.

Seems a bit overwhelming at the moment, but I am hoping that once I start getting things put on paper it will all come together. Hope the rest of you are having success!

April Timeline

This week will be a busy one! My to-do lists are getting consistently longer and I need to tackle it. I know that I have been saying this for weeks, but I am contacting vendors this week to ask for some coupons or products to place in our race day goody bags. On my list for today are Harvest Fresh and Betty Lou's. I also received some contact information for massage therapists. I will be asking if they can set up a booth on race day and provide some 10% off coupons!

As of yesterday, Becky is officially not working at Habitat for Humanity. It is definitely a loss because she has so much knowledge on running the event, but she left us in capable hands: Diane Longaker. Becky is still available by email if we need to get in touch with her, which I may have to do regarding the bibs.

We ordered the bibs for the race yesterday, and we should receive them April 25 (give or take a day). I'm really excited to see them; they look fantastic on PDF! I am continuing to work on the registration spreadsheet, but I'm not sure how to assign bib numbers. That's a question for Becky, gotta get her email address now...

I will be going in on Friday after class to start an inventory list of everything we have for race day. I think this will help us in organization because we will know what we have and what we need. I am also trying to get some girls from my sorority to help with the inventory count this Friday, making it a community service event. I feel that it will be good for me to start going in for a couple of hours every Friday. This will help me buckle down and start crossing off things on my to-do list.

Transcriptions

So I have now moved on to the next stage of my internship: that of transcribing all sixteen interviews. Usually the interviews take up to forty-five minutes, and forty-five minutes of recording usually takes about two hours, sometimes three hours to transcribe. It's a really grueling and intense process, and probably is the least enjoyable part of the internship. Right now I am up to my forth interview, and I think it will take me another two weeks before I finish transcribing all the interviews. This is going to be interesting.

Design a logo/header

Susan Blosser gave a challenging mission: to design a logo/header for the website. The old header was just "Yamhill Enrichment Society" with green background. Another student, who worked for her during Jan-term, designed a header with three pictures as background. In order to match the design of the website and YES's objectives, I decided to come up with a entire new idea.
Susan really likeed the native Oregon White Oak, because she said it's a symbol of strength, longevity, and stability, depends on a strong root system for its majestic character, and taking a cue from the oak, YES nourishes Yamhill County at its roots to grow a strong, vibrant community. So I added the oak into the header, which gives the header a little bit personality. I sat in the MSCM lab and change back and forth and finally had a header in green and white. It's clean and simple, which can tell it's a non-profit organization.

CASA Auction Video

Hello!

So, this week I've been working on a totally different project outside of advertising for the CASA auction at the end of April.  Amy, my supervisor, asked me to create a video that could be shown on auction night.

Because we don't have a way to create a video of our own right now, we took videos from the National CASA Youtube channel.  I chose 4 videos and compiled and edited them into one 13 minute video.

I had a big learning experience using a new video software in the Tech Lab, but I really enjoyed the process of video editing.

So far this internship has given me a lot of new opportunities and I guess this would be a good example of how broad their needs become and how flexible I need to be in order to meet those needs.

Meeting with Mr. Thorsgard

Unfortunately my meeting with Mr. Thorsgard was not quite what I was expecting. After speaking with Mr. Merrill I was under the impression that Mr. Thorsgard had some ideas of his own for this project, but I was wrong. Instead, Mr. Thorsgard suggested that I take part in some reading and lots of it. He provided me with an informational packet that contains tribal history, important dates, a list of suggested readings, a DVD on tribal history, and a book. Once I had familiarized myself with these documents and the history of the tribes then I could set up another meeting with him to discuss the powerpoint. Additionally, I am to set up a meeting with Julie Brown in order to get pictures. The pictures are an additional "hassle" because there is a process by which I must go through in order to use the pictures. Mr. Thorsgard and the other members who work in cultural resources are given the pictures by families, but with stipulations. For example, if a picture was given to them with strict restrictions for only the family to see them then I would not be able to use them for the project.

My plan for right now is to read as much of the history as possible in order to have a general understanding of where the tribes have been and how they came to be what they are today. For the presentation I will focus mainly on the first interactions with settlers and how the tribes came to be at Grand Ronde. There are two periods of time which the Confederated Tribes feel are most significant in regards to their efforts for restoration--I will highlight these as well and end with where they are today and the contributions they are able to make back to the community.

Challenge

Today I experienced my most challenging interview so far. The home owner was very suspicious about what our intentions were with the project and at first refused to have us take any pictures, or interview her. Even after several attempts of offering detailed explanations on who we are and what purpose this project serves, the home owner remained skeptical and suspicious. I finally gave her my supervisor's business card and offered to come back a different time after she had a chance to talk with my supervisor a bit more to clarify any questions or concerns she may have. The home owner did not take this offer, even after offering it to her several times, and finally reluctantly agreed to be interviewed, but without the voice recorder.

Throughout the interview, the home owner often responded with caution, suspicion, and even hostility, and I constantly felt on-edge, never knowing what her reactions would be to each question. I believe the only reason she agreed to be interviewed was because I had told her every other adult foster care home around the area is participating in this project. This idea was confirmed when, at the end, I asked if I could take a picture of her, to which she immediately replied with a furious head shake "Mm-mmm, no." I made a comment that it might be strange that her home would be the only home without a picture of the owner in the portfolio, and then afterwards, she suddenly had a change of heart and said "Oh, I was just joking with you earlier. Of corse you can take a picture of me!" Like I said earlier, I never knew what to expect from her. Along with being the most challenging and stressful, it also was the longest interview we conducted. Most interviews took 45 minutes, sometimes up to an hour. This one took an hour and forty-five minutes. I would say it was a very stressful but also very valuable learning experience, though I can only hope that I will not have to face another similar interviewing experience. I am now so grateful that the majority of the interviewees have been so generous and cooperative.

Now we're talking...literally!

As I mentioned in my last post, I was not having much luck getting in contact with a tribal member or setting up a meeting. Thankfully this changed with a phone call from Mr. Merrill's assistant and I was able to quickly get in touch with Mr. Merrill directly and set up a meeting. Last Monday I made a trip out to the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde to discuss the project with Mr. Merrill and hopefully get some direction. Unfortunately Mr. Merrill was not the appropriate person for me to talk to in regards to the project itself, but a critical contact for the LCN and for the remainder of the project. He was able to put me in contact with Mr. Eirik Thorsgard, a tribal member in charge of their own cultural relations.

At this point I have a meeting scheduled with Mr. Thorsgard the Wednesday after we return from Spring Break. He is very excited about the project and has already begun to brainstorm some ideas. This is a great start for the project and I am looking forward to where Mr. Thorsgard takes me and this internship next.

Unexpected Changes

As you have heard, my supervisor has accepted another position at a winery and will no longer be working on RWR. In fact, she made it very clear yesterday that she will not be helping out in anyway except to answer questions when they come up. As of yesterday, the RWR email account has been forwarded to my account and the amount of work that I am doing for the event has tripled. I have become my own supervisor.


As Jeff was saying, this is an opportunity for me to gain experience in a more supervisory and managerial role. Event planning is a career path that I am very interested in, and have found that I love very much. I am starting to open up more on ideas that I have for the event. When we met yesterday, I suggested a staggered awards ceremony. All the races begin at the same time, and we can do the 5K award ceremony first, followed by the 10K, and then the bike race. This will allow participants to be rewarded without making them wait for the event to be completely over.


I am a little overwhelmed at the moment with all the work that still needs to be done, and with all the work that has been placed on my shoulders. I still feel like I am pretty behind. I think I may have to schedule time to just go into the office and get things done, like 3 days a week.

Communication is a key

Building a website really requires to focus on thousands of details. At the same time, website is a creative work. In order to integrate YES's branding strategies, I talked with Susan frequently. For example, YES doesn't have a logo, but Susan told me to use retro style for font. And for the design of the site, I made sure that the site design is more advanced than old site and meets YES's objectives. Susan gave me suggestion that YES's brochure is a good model to look at.

However, I learned it's impossible to communicate each detail with Susan. I need to make some decisions and even provide two options for Susan to choose. I suggested Susan to have three columns below to introduce three YES's major projects: Education & the Arts, Food & Arguculture, History & Community.

History of Asian Immigrants in McMinnville

This semester I'll be conducting research on the 100 Years History of Asian Americans in McMinnville for Yamhill Enrichment Society's (YES) McMinnville 100 Years Ago: Then, Now, and Beyond project. I actually did another research topic, Education in McMinnville 100 Years Ago, for YES last fall semester for my Sociology of Community class and became more interested in the organization and its goals. As I was researching the types of students who attended Linfield College in the early 1900s and discovered there was a Chinese and Japanese student here. Then I heard about the "underground city" the Chinese-Americans lived in around the 3rd Street area. I heard about the opportunity to continue doing research for YES in the spring semester as an internship through Jeff Peterson and Rob Gardner and decided to take it.

RWR Update

Hey all! I hope everyone's internships are going great.

I am still working on the pre-registration Excel spreadsheet for the event. It keeps getting longer and I'm loving that! I have been answering a lot of questions regarding registration, how to get a team registered, and how to pay. One company has offered to pay for the registration of their employees but not their families and was unsure about how to go about doing that. I told them that they could either register all their employees themselves, or have their employees register and the company reimburse them once they have registered.

Last week, I met with Susan Chambers who is the chairperson for the Faith Relations Committee. We have decided to create a little insert to put into the Churchs' newsletters to get more teams created from the churches in the community. She will be my contact person for the churches.

Also, our yard signs are done and ready for pick up. I will be doing that hopefully later this afternoon or tomorrow. I am also starting to get in contact with local businesses about donating items for our goody bags that go to the first 200 pre-registered participants.

Finally, I got our quotes for the t-shirts and am excited to get to see them. I just want to say that I am a huge fan of the dry fit and really want to get those! I will definitely be ordering one. Our t-shirt design has been finalized and can be viewed at http://runwalkride2012.blogspot.com.

Tomorrow I will be meeting with the RWR Team at 10:00am. It looks like our online store will be finalized soon (as soon as we get pictures of the items). I think this is an excellent way to make a little extra cash on items we have had in inventory for a while.

Internship at the NWSDS

My internship is with the Northwest Senior and Disability Services in McMinnville. It is a intergovernmental agency that provides information, assistance, and services to seniors and people with disability in order to promote independence and enhance their quality of life. Part of this effort includes trying to redirect people from nursing homes, which are often expensive and overcrowded, into other living facilities, like adult foster care homes. In an effort to educate seniors and their families about what adult foster care homes are, I was given a project to create a one-page profile of each of the adult foster care homes in Yamhill County and compile them into a portfolio for NWSDS to show to clients in the future.

In order to do this, I had to call each adult foster care home and schedule appointments, travel to these homes, interview and take pictures of their home, and transcribe the interview from my voice recorder. The interviewing process will take up most of March to complete, and I think I will be spending a lot of my springbreak transcribing the interviews and working on creating the profile in order to have this project done in time for May.

This project is something that I have never done before, and has been (and will probably continue to be) a great informative learning experience. I am most nervous about creating the one-page profile for each home since I feel that it is the area that I have least experience in. I think I will be needing all the help I can get once I reach that step of the project.

If you're curious about what NWSDS is and the services that they offer, feel free to visit their website nwsds.org

The office building on a rare sunny Oregon day

Building a Wordpress site 101

Nowadays, everyone is able to blog, but not everyone is able to build a website-like blog. In my mass communication digital class, my classmates and I built a website called Wildcat Nation, which was a news website. But we couldn't figure out how to make the site more like a website. By doing YES internship, I finally figured out. I have to thank to my two teachers, Google and Godaddy.com's technical support people.

The photo on the left is the regular version of wordpress's dashboard, which you can see "pages" and "settings" on the bottom. First you should create a page with the content you want front page looks like.

By clicking settings, and reading, you can see a option to display either your latest posts or a static page, which will be the front page of website.

Obstacles

I am currently running in to a few obstacles in the progress of my project. Jason Rodriguez was able to obtain contact information for a tribal member that would be a particularly important resource. I immediately sent an e-mail that described the internship project in detail and emphasized my desire to make a trip out to the reservation in order to have a full discussion with him and other tribal members, elders, or the council members. This was last week on Monday and I have yet to receive a response. I sent yet another e-mail with additional contact information, as well as an e-mail to Jason to set up a date where him and I could just make a trip out there.

Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde

As a part of the Y.E.S. Internship I have had the opportunity to represent the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. At this point I am not clear as to what aspect of their tribal history I will be highlighting, but before I make any decisions I will be meeting with the tribal council. It is very important not only to me, but to the tribes that they are accurately represented and their struggles are recognized. Some ideas that I have considered include education (the boarding school is reaching its 100 year anniversary), language, and obstacles to maintain cultural solidarity.

I have provided a link which gives an overview of the Tribe's history. It is very fascinating and I encourage everyone to take a look. This internship will be an excellent learning opportunity and hopefully a way to improve relations between the College and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde.

http://www.grandronde.org/ikanum/index.html

Internship at Yamhill County CASA

Hi Everyone,

Right now I am interning at Yamhill County Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  I've actually volunteered there since September in hopes of learning more about them before deciding whether I wanted to turn it into an internship opportunity for January through spring, which obviously I chose to do :)

CASA is a special non-profit organization in that it's mostly made up of volunteers who serve as a CASA for a child or family of children.  They advocate and give voice to children going through the court system after coming out of an abusive or neglected home.  The work that these people do is amazing and I'm so glad to be part of this organization.  Here are new volunteers being sworn in by a judge:

With that said, the office I work in is relatively small with just 3 wonderful women maintaining Yamhill County's CASA program, so the work I do is obviously extremely helpful and needed.

In January my main focus was coming up with  new ways of recruiting and retaining new volunteers.  It involved a lot of data collecting of their current and past volunteers as well as talking with other CASA organizations in Oregon and seeing what they're doing and whether we can implement similar practices.  This definitely was a struggle for me since I had to try and come up with fresh ideas, which I have a hard time doing by myself.  But nevertheless, it was a great learning experience and I feel because of that I'm able to do a better job in my project for spring.

For spring my work solely lies in advertising for the big annual auction they hold once a year, so the amount of stress and pressure I have is pretty heavy since I want to make sure we sell-out on tickets for the event.  The money they raise in that one event goes towards recruiting, training, and supporting our CASA volunteers throughout the year, so it's crucial.

So far I've had a lot of learning opportunities from creating flyers on Photoshop Element (which is a pain!) to actually going out their and talking to local businesses, hanging up flyers, asking for donations and sometimes a chance to advertise on their reader boards (which was and still is super hard for me to do since most of the time the answer is "no" :( ).  In researching new ways to advertise I've found out so much more about McMinnville and how it runs, who to ask and contact.

I've contacted local churches, McMinnville Downtown Association, newspapers, the local radio, and it's just been such an awesome learning experience for me so far and I know I'll continue learning more.


If you're interested in finding out more about CASA, feel free to visit them at yccasa.org :)

Internship at Mac Habitat!!

So, I actually started my internship in the beginning of January. I am taking over quite a bit of the planning aspects, particularly with sponsors, teams, the Kids Fun Run, and registration. I have attended quite a bit of meetings regarding our new website and our t-shirts. I have already created and mailed sponsorship flyers, have created a "How to Become a Team Captain" flyer, and have started compiling the pre-registration Excel spreadsheet. I will now start working on calling businesses around the area to see if they can donate things to our goody bags that we are giving away for free for our first 200 pre-registered participants.

I have also started a blog: http://runwalkride2012.blogspot.com. This has a much more detailed account as to the specific things that I have been doing.  I will be going into the office tomorrow to gather more registration forms!!

Also, if you would like more information in regards to the McMinnville Habitat for Humanity Run, Walk, Ride event, please visit their website at http://rwr.machabitat.org.

:)

Designing a new website for YES

Website design can be really boring but unexpected. You never know what is next challenge or difficulty, but you always need to be ready to solve the problem.
Last week, I had a meeting with Susan B., professor Huntsberger and Paloma and discussed to build a new website for Yamhill Enrichment Society. We were trying to transcode the content Paloma already built on Wordpress.com. Unfortunately, it still didn't work well after 3-hour effort. Technology problems drive me crazy. Then we decided to build one on godaddy.com, which Susan has bought domain. Susan also wants me to have a rough web page done by Thursday so she can show to the board. Here is my first challenge for this internship.

First Post

Greetings from Guatemala! Please make your first post about your internship, what you plan to do, and what your primary focus is!