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!