Friday, May 31, 2013

Week 3 - Farmworker camp, Public Interest Attorneys, Deposition



This week’s topic correlates perfectly with the service that I did. I went on outreach with one of the attorneys and one of the paralegals in Labelle which is a city located about 45 minutes from where I do my volunteer hours. We went to a farmworker camp and asked the farmworkers if they were treated properly during their time here. At first, they said that they were but the paralegal began making jokes with them and building their trust. He told them that he understood that they might not want to admit that they were mistreated because they still had two weeks left before they went to Mexico. He went on to explain that it is important that the law firm knows about what is going on in the farm so that other workers will not get mistreated next season. They finally admitted that they were underpaid. It was an unforgettable experience because I got to see the type of houses that the farmworkers live in during their time in the United States. It was a one bedroom, one bathroom house and about 8-10 workers lived in each house. There were no fans or air condition. It started raining while the attorney and I were walking to each house but that did not stop us from doing our job. On the way to the farmworker camp, the attorney was telling me the advantages and disadvantages of working as a public interest attorney. One of the main advantages is that you are able to help people. One of the main disadvantages is that the salary is not as high as people expect it be. I also got to participate in a deposition involving Haitian farmworkers. I helped work on the case last summer by calculating the loss of wages and on Friday, the clients came in and a settlement of $1,500 was reached. All in all, it was a great week.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Summer of Service at my Second Home!!!

I am so excited to be doing my SOS at Naples Equestrian Challenge. This was where I have been volunteering since I was 12. Naples Equestrian Challenge (NEC) is a therapeutic riding stable that provides therapy for over 400 children and adults with various needs per year!!! Every summer NEC puts on summer camps for both special needs and typically developing children. I was a camper here when I was eight years old and it sparked my interest in becoming a volunteer.  I have been not only a regular volunteer at NEC but a camp counselor the past six years. This year I am in charge of running the summer camp along with being a volunteer manager for riding lessons and an intern in the office. 
Camp does not officially start until June 10th so right now is the planning stages. I have been planning for camp since mid March. This included coming up with a camp counselor handbook outlining all the responsibilities of the counselors, a list of rules for the campers and counselors, a quiz for the counselors to take after our training sessions and arts and crafts ideas. Since coming home from school I have been meeting with one of the staff members that is going to be helping me with camp and we have been brainstorming ideas to make camp a success. Along with learning about horses and getting to ride the campers do arts and crafts, outside activities and learn team work. Right now my main focus is on the arts and craft and outside activities. It seems that every year we do the same games and crafts and this year we wanted to do something different. So I got on Pinterest and started pinning. It is hard to find crafts that children of all age and ability levels can do but there were quite a few I found. 
Besides helping with summer camp I am going to be the volunteer coordinator on Monday nights at NEC's regular lessons. This job involves assigning volunteers to riders and horses, checking the riders in and assisting the instructor if they need any help. I have been learning how to do this job from the current volunteer coordinator (who has Monday nights off in the summer). It may seem easy to just assign volunteers to do certain tasks but that's not the case. I have to play matchmaker and make sure the volunteers that I assign work well with the horse or rider. We have ten unique horses with ten different personalities and to ensure the best and safest experience for all matching volunteers with horses is very important. 
I will also be interning in the office at NEC. The people in the office are in charge of all the behind the scenes work that makes NEC function. I have been helping out the program manger for the last couple of years and this summer I will continue with that work. I have helped to get information ready for new volunteers, worked to help recruit new volunteers and done lots of filing so far this summer. 
My goals for this summer is to continue to make a difference in the lives of children with disabilities. I also want camp to be successful and for everyone to have a fun and safe time. One of the things I am most excited about is to learn more about how NEC works so I can bring new ideas to my service site at school (Hope Reins) to help them in the improvement of their program. 

St. Francis Week II - Challenges

I'm going to do my absolute best to avoid making it sound like I'm complaining about the St. Francis. Allow me to make a brief disclaimer: without a doubt, I love the St. Francis. For some reason, my words have a way of getting twisted and sounding like I'm complaining, when in reality the only reason I notice such small details is because I have such a love for my volunteer sites. With that being said, onward!

It's hard to point out a challenge that is all-encompassing, because the St. Francis provides such an immense variety of services to the St. Johns homeless population. In food services, we have a terribly tiny food pantry that makes me feel just a little claustrophobic every time I'm in it. As far as pros to the food pantry go, though, they are literally overflowing with food. They have an entire wall, floor-to-ceiling, of TEFAP food, as well as almost every other kind of delicious donation you could imagine. They also have an entire wall of food reserved exclusively for the kitchen's use. But the food challenge is really just space: there's not a lot of space for volunteers to move around, there's not a lot of space to store food boxes that are already made up prior to food days (MWF) and then there's no room to store empty boxes for volunteers to fill with food for food days. There's really just no space for pantry food. Again, another bonus is that we have really incredibly large walk in refrigerators and a huuuuuuuge freezer, just like in a school.

Challenges to our shower service right now is that the only type of towels we have are really thin, small, ratty towels. I actually have spent an hour calling local hotels asking for donations, but of course they all use them for rags once they're no longer usable. But we have plenty of soap, shower gel, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, mouthwash and lotion, which is a complete godsend from what we get at the Neighborhood Center. The bathroom behind the kitchen is where we store them, and we have a floor-to-ceiling shelf plus the crack space between that shelf and the wall FULL of little hotel minis. For the time being, what we really need are towels.

And then for me, the ultimate challenge is my own desire to do everything perfectly. When I worked at the city-wide summer camp in my hometown, our site manager and I had a rough few first weeks until he finally came to me and said I needed to stop being afraid of him. I have that trouble wherever I go, because I want to do the best I can not to get in anyone's way, or make a mess or have my superiors need to backtrack to fix my mistakes. I wonder if anyone else ever feels that way. Our ED here, Renee, has had to come to me a few times about the exact way she likes a message taken, or just other smaller, snide comments about how I do things. I know she probably isn't meaning to cut me down, but I take everything so personally. I really need to just buck up and grow a thick skin, but I always end up with this overwhelming feeling that I'm causing more trouble than I'm helping, and then I get really insecure and apologize in an annoying frequency, which then actually gets her mad at me, and then it's just a downward cycle, haha. It helps for me to keep in mind that I'm here to help the homeless and not to be a secretary, so when I accidentally forget to ask who's calling before I transfer to her I remind myself it's not the end of the world. Aside from those challenges, everything is going pretty smoothly. All of the employees seem to really enjoy having me here, which is great because I'm so overjoyed to be here.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Week 1

Hey all, I am still not entirely sure how to use this website, but here I am trying. So my volunteering program for summer 2013 is quite diverse; I am planing to volunteer at Education USA, SOS Children's Village, and at International SOS Hospital (and perhaps more, if chances come up). The reason I am doing so is that I could not meet the hour requirement if I volunteered only at one place - in the summers, there is less work load, thus less work for volunteers in the fields I am working in. Let me briefly describe each. Education USA is an organization that deals with different educational programs and activities to improve students' knowledge of English language; it is funded by the US State Deprt. and they have a number of events that I help them with - conversation clubs, movie nights, and info sessions on the studying abroad. SOS Children's Village is one of the largest children's welfare organizations and they help/reach out to the poor and disadvantaged community all across Azerbaijan. I help with Play BUS which is part of the SOS Children's Village; they drive to different schools, orphanages, villages...to help local kids with education, physical activities, and play games! The International SOS Hospital in Baku, is one of many such hospitals around the world. Here I am a non-payed volunteer and I help with non-medical aspects of treating patients, such as helping with filling out forms in English, helping with directions, and customer service jobs. -Aykhan

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

RSVP and being Junior Intern

 
 

To Read or Not to Read, That is the Question

Honor Baslim
 
 
Hi everyone,
 
So I'm not exactly sure who is going to take the time to actually read this blog post, but if someone does I do sincerely hope you enjoy it.
 
Thus far into my Summer of Service I have begun work as the 2013-2014 Junior Intern, as well as working with graduated Senior Intern, Courtney Williams with the Volusia County Retired & Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) as an intern.
 
The Retired & Senior Volunteer Program is a program that recruits retired individuals of a minimum age of 55 who are interested in volunteering. Each RSVP program selects three issue areas for there county, in Volusia county the three issue areas are: early childhood literacy, mentorship with at risk youth, and disaster preparedness plans for businesses.
 
With RSVP today (May 21) I assisted Courtney in an orientation of newly recruited volunteers out at the Daytona Beach Public Lirbrary. We had four volunteers arrive promptly at 10am and we were with them till roughly noon. An associate of Courtney's named Lauren who works with the Early Learning Coalition of Flagler & Volusia County came and spoke with the volunteers (all of who are interested in reading to young children). The Early Learning Coalition focuses primarily on reading to children four and younger, but RSVP also coordinates with Head Start, as well as many other youth literacy programs. Since it's summer time however the new volunteers will not be able to start working with kids in classrooms until the beginning of the school year, until then we will get them fully oriented and get their background checks fully processed while continuing to recruit new volunteers.
 
As far as Junior Intern process goes, this summer I am working primarily on 3 projects: The 2013 Fall Retreat, Freshman Exploration, and orienting incoming Bonners. A LOT, and I mean a lot of help from our fantastic Senior Interns Deryck and Julie. If anyone is reading this and has any suggestions about any of this please PLEASE feel free to text me (978)239-4705.
 
 

Monday, May 20, 2013

St. Francis House Week I - Goals

Hi guys! I hope everyone's service is going well, and I hope we can all make an impact in the communities in which we're serving. My immediate goals for the St. Francis House are immense, because although they serve a much larger population than the Neighborhood Center and offer more services, resources for the case managers and staff here are miniscule. There are a lot of small changes that can be made simply by having more bodies here to do the jobs. Just like at the Neighborhood Center, there are two case managers, a bookkeeper and an ED, all of which are doing the work of 10 people. As far as short term goals are concerned, I'm interested in completely rewriting their resource lists for St. Johns and Duval counties, which have been amended and are now covered in pen and have completely different phone numbers and addresses from what were originally typed. I'd also like to help clean out their warehouse and clothing closets, which are way too small for the amount of product they have stuffed inside. Unlike at the Neighborhood Center, their warehouse is very small and their food is kept on shelves, making it impossible to use the banana box system like we do. Food is just thrown on shelves, stacked as much as possible into the tiny cells for each type of food. Their closet for clothing for the homeless is overflowing, which is great, but the problem is its lack of organization. It would be such a burden relief to the case managers if a little more organization could happen. Of course, they can't spend time organizing it themselves, because they see at least fifty clients before lunch is served at 11am.
Long term, I hope to train myself under the guidance of Maura, a case manager and former mental health professional, to really understand how to work with the homeless and helping get them back on their feet. This is the type of career I want, no matter the struggle, and I've been told by the other case manager, Beth, that Maura is who I should look to for guidance. I've sort of been thrown into the stew pot here, because the plight of the St. Augustine homeless is so much worse than in Deland. Most of y'all probably aren't aware of this, but St. Augustine has set city-wide ordinances against the homeless even standing on street corners, let alone being fed or sleeping on them. Luckily the St. Augustine PD will send the homeless to our shelter before throwing them in jail, which is a blessing. I hope that I can take all of this immense stress and heavy work I'm doing here and bring it back to the Neighborhood Center. More than anything, I'm so so thankful to even be here. This shelter has already changed my life, and I've only been here for an hour and a half.

Week 2



Week last summer. Once challenge I did face, however, was gathering a list of clients who had been denied unemployment benefits due to their inability to speak English. The unemployment office is required since November 2011, by law, to provide translators in every language. Last summer, I discovered that many clients were denied their benefits because when they called, there was no one able to speak their language. I had to go through a list of clients who had been denied unemployment benefits since 2011 and create a mailing list for them. I then had to type out a letter, get two advocates to translate the letter into Creole and Spanish, and then mail out eighty letters. This was not challenging, but it was time consuming and I had to do it quickly because the lawsuit has to be filed by June 5. My second project was to create a wage sheet table for about 20 farm workers who were underpaid during their time here in the United States. I had to make a table for how many weeks they worked, how much they were paid each week, how much they should have been paid, and how much they are owed. They all had paystubs but many of them were missing. From the paystubs that were present, however, all of the farm workers are owed at least $1,500. 2 weeks down, 5 more to go.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Kou Sua - Week 1



My goal for volunteering at the law firm is to learn more about civil rights/human rights law. I volunteered at this law firm last summer and I learned a lot about the law. As an intern, I get to work under the supervision of three attorneys in the Farm Worker Unit. I will also get to go on “outreach.” This means that I will get to go out to the farm worker communities around my hometown with some of the advocates and attorneys to help resolve issues. Since I plan to practice law before I teach, this is a perfect opportunity and maybe I will have a job as soon as I graduate from law school.