A Day

There was no escaping that the title of this blog post was going to be a reference to either an egotistical cliché, “A Day in the Life of” or a song, “A Day,” by Clan of Xymox.

Since one of the purposes of this blog is to provide a little snapshot of the lives of fellows, I figured I’d go through my day.  As I noticed—and as the presenters addressed—at the first D.C. Project 55 seminar on “Careers in Non-Profits,” the narrative distance of a panel or blog makes one’s life look a lot more seamless than it actually is.

To the Princeton student who’s reading this, I begin like Maimonides in his epistolary introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, “this is for you and others like you.”

Disclaimers made, let’s go into granular detail.  On weekdays, I wake up a bit after four and do my morning pages.  I followed Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way before beginning at Princeton and I wrote my thesis on her program and other creative recovery programs.   I meditate and then go exercise in the fitness center in the townhouse development where my aunt and uncle live.  I live with them for a few reasons: my uncle offered me a deal on rent I can’t refuse, my car insurance is cheaper in Virginia than in the Capital (et tu, The Hunger Games?), and I’ve always lived with family during summers and for internships and whatnot.  I return home, shower, dress, drink my green juice, eat my oatmeal, and my uncle drops me off at a metro station on his way to work. 

I start work at 07:30.  Besides entering information into Character Education Partnership’s development database, I sometimes design cards, make phone calls to encourage schools, business, and others to attend CEP’s National Forum on Character Education, compile and send thank-you notes, execute fundraising research, and sort accounting files.  I leave the office to eat lunch since I don’t believe in eating where you work.  There’s a more vulgar way to say that, but I’ll leave it to your imagination.  I drink 4/7 of my lunch since I cannot chew all I need to sustain myself in 30 minutes (juicing…that’s why my parents gave me a high-speed blender as a graduation present). 

Once a week CEP gathers for a staff meeting, and I attend other meetings as the need arises.  I currently take notes for the fundraising committee meetings since I will be doing quite a bit of data entry as the new director of development writes a new fundraising plan.  Working with a supervisor who telecommutes from across the country is probably not for everyone; I get along very well with her, which means we communicate clearly.  As one of my coworkers said this week, a “certain synergy” comes from working in an office with fellow humans.  Sabrina is right on in her observations about forced face time not really being downtime.  Adjectives fail me to describe how much I dislike staring at a computer all day.

I metro back to Alexandria and walk home.  Sometimes I have to feed my aunt and uncle’s two cats.  I eat supper, which is usually a portion of a dish I made on the weekend.  I assemble the juices and grains for the next day.  I take a walk around Alexandria, and then I come home, pick out the next day’s clothes, shower, read a little sacred text, and go to bed hopefully before 21:00. 

Wash, rinse, repeat.  One of my weekend days involves cooking whatever I find at the Alexandria farmers’ market, and one of my weekend days involves going to church.

That’s it for the extreme detail.   Best regards to you, Princeton senior, and go back to work on your thesis!

Three months in

I realize this post is long overdue. In late June, the morning after I had gotten back from my Spain vacation that I had barely been able to squeeze in after graduation, I started work at the Heads Up! Pediatric Literacy Program. After being on the job for three months, my perspective on my role in this nonprofit has swayed back and forth between the good and the (somewhat) bad, and I supposed I'd talk a bit about that here.

As coordinator of the literacy program, your job is essentially to keep the program running and functioning. There are books that need to be restocked two floors above my office, right inside of the clinic where doctors will have access to them. There are volunteers - retired women, mostly - who run the book carts, report back to you about whatever is needed, and pleasantly chat with you about your weekend and plans for the future. There are also multiple locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens that must be visited, maintained, and well stocked with books. The coordinator is in charge of buying and receiving these books, once the program has received its thousands of dollars of funding. The coordinator also has the freedom to use downtime, of which there has been plenty in the past couple of weeks, to decide what aspects of the program can be improved and to take charge and implement those changes.

When I started working here, I was excited yet quite terrified. My predecessor, Ben, had been very good about guiding me for our one week of overlap, but I didn't know how I would handle this entire program once he left. When he did leave, I'd often send  him sheepish text messages asking about where certain book locations were, usually because I'd already walked around the area several times and couldn't for the life of me remember anything. That's the thing about this job - once the previous fellow leaves, you realize just how independent this job really is. Even though I was scared of screwing up, I embraced this job's freedom and felt like this would provide me a fantastic and certainly unique opportunity as a new college grad. I still do embrace it, but there are certainly negatives to working in such an independent atmosphere.

One reason is that it's difficult to get feedback on whatever it is you're working on. My boss is absolutely wonderful, and she is always there to help and to talk to when I need her. However, she has her own, many responsibilities as a child psychologist in Weill Cornell, and I often prefer to not distract her with the day to day business of the job. Also, when you encounter frustrating things -- such as ordering books from absolutely incompetent book vendors, who force you to spend weeks talking to customer service representatives, inconvenience you with several instances of miscommunication, and send you completely incorrect book shipments -- it's easy to wish that there was somebody else there who could also help out, or somebody to at least vent to while on the job.

In these past few months, I've learned that this job certainly isn't perfect. Of course, no job is perfect, as there will always be people you don't enjoy interacting with, as well as annoyances that pop up. However, I know that it's important that these day to day things don't get to me too much. After all, it's the goal and mission of this job that I'm working for -- the goal to keep this program running so that the children we serve, who have so little access to outside resources and are at risk for developmental and cognitive delays, have access to new books every time they visit the doctor. Those children, who light up when they receive their books, and who cry and beg their mothers to let them stay just a liiiiiitle longer in the hospital so that they can read with us, are the ones who make this job worth it. This job is a process of learning the importance of overlooking the smaller problems to work toward the greater goals.

Maximizing downtime

Today, the folks at my office experienced a morning and afternoon of technological limbo. We have been in the midst of a server upgrade since last week and the people from our Internet Service Provider (who will not be named) were in the office doing some work today. As a result, we were offline for most of the day and not just that – we had to log out of our computers.

Since we could not use our desktops, I was unable to do my normal tasks such as replying to e-mails and compiling documents. Instead, I wandered over to where Mary, my fellow PP55 fellow, sits and we had a conversation. What happened was that we saw people we don’t normally see creep out of their offices and talk to each other. (I’m guilty of the same thing – sitting with my headphones on and my door closed when I’m taking minutes from conference calls.)

Mary and I were discussing our social media efforts when a brainwave hit – why don’t we grab some photos of the staff at the Housing Development Fund and post a sound-bite from each of them on our Facebook page? This could give prospective clients a better idea of who the people “behind-the-scenes” are and what they actually do.

This led to a conversation about photographers and events with our Director of Operations, Joanne, who sits in an office near Mary. This was when we realized that we really should make sure we have the personal contact information of the event photographer we really like, so that we keep in touch even if she were to leave the company she is working for right now.

Later on, our colleague Debbie, the Director of Counseling, came over and told us about a credit workshop she was going to run in the afternoon. I asked her if we could take a look at her slides since Mary and I were just starting out in terms of building our credit history. Not only did we get to read the slides, but Debbie also gave us a nutshell version of her workshop which was really useful.

And then, since the computers were still not online, Mary and I joined in a massive collective effort led by Valerie, our Director of Lending, to organize our filing system – checking and ordering the client files alphabetically from left-to-right, and removing damaged dividers in the drawers. Since we had five people sorting through the drawers, we got that done within an hour.

Takeaways? Downtime doesn’t need to be wasted time. It can be the time to do important things (like doing "maintenance" for the filing system) that usually take a backseat when we are constantly barraged by e-mails and other tasks. Downtime is a great time to connect with colleagues face-to-face. This might be that opportunity to walk over and learn from the expertise of someone else in your organization. In the midst of your conversations, you might even come up with some innovative ideas. Come to think about it, downtime can be pretty productive too.  

September at HDF

It’s been just month since I started my fellowship at the Housing Development Fund in Stamford, Connecticut (allow with my fellow Fellow, Sabrina.) My title is “Development Assistant,” which I have learned encompasses a wide variety of roles!

After just two days on the job, I found myself in Cincinnati at the 2012 NeighborWorks Training Institute. I took classes about company branding and grant-writing, and participated in the 2012 Young Professionals Symposium. It was a great opportunity to get to know some of my co-workers,  meet other professionals from all over the country, and generally to get a crash course in the field of community development and housing!

Recently, I’ve been involved in the “Communications” part of Development and Communications. My first big project was putting together and sending out our summer newsletter, which was a great way to get informed about HDF’s initiatives and achievements. Hitting ‘send’ on a message to over 4,000 people was an interesting experience!

I’ve also been organizing several events coming up in the next few months, from a ribbon-cutting on a new property whose construction HDF financed, to a Post-Purchase meeting following up with clients who have purchased their first home through our First Time Homebuyer Program, to an event celebrating HDF’s charter with NeighborWorks America at the State Capitol.

When I’m not working on event planning things, I’m updating our website, helping to design invitations and promotional materials, scheduling clients for our First-Time Homebuyer Program, and planning for a database architecture project meeting next week – a good mix of planning procedures, coming up with abstract and creative solutions, and working directly with the people we serve.

It's September already!

This is my very first post for the blog and I am very excited! (I moved to Chicago in mid-August and started my fellowship August 20th; hence, the late post).

This year I am working with Free Spirit Media, a non-profit organization that provides free media and video production classes to high school students on Chicago's West and South Sides.

My internship is off to a slowish start due in large part to the fact that the climate in the public education system in Chicago is extremely tense. CPS (Chicago Public School) teachers are planning a strike due to the longer school day approved by the city of Chicago. The longer school day has been approved in order to curtail the escalating violence in Chicago. Since 2008, more than 530 youth have been killed in Chicago with nearly 80 percent of the homicides occurring in 22 African-American or Latino community areas on the city’s South, Southwest and West sides. I was having lunch with two friends in Hyde Park, and my friend a Chicago native said, "In Chicago, we go to Afghhanistan for coffee." When you really think about how more youth have died in Chicago this year than soldiers killed in Afghanistan in 2012, you realize how bad the situation is. Literally,  youth walk around their neighborhoods fearful. It is an actual war zone. Every single weekend, youth are killed in Chicago. every single weekend. (I think my next post will be about the unfortunate popularity of the Chief Keef movement, a Chicago rapper who a lot of my students listen to).

Right now, I split my time between the Development Office (writing grant proposals..etc) and North Lawndale College Prep - Collins where I help lead classes during the school day. Soon I will be switched to Power House High School where I will be helping with the after-school program four days a week.

Nevertheless, my two weeks with Free Spirit Media have been unbelievably eye-opening. The education system in Chicago is incredibly segregated. NLCP and Power House are near 98% African American. Theses students never leave their neighborhoods on the South and West sides and do not fully understand that there is a whole world of opportunity outside of their communities. Poverty rates are extremely high, over 50% in North Lawndale. Outside of their teachers, a lot of the students have never communicated with people outside of their race.

After helping to lead four class periods last Friday, I was asked to help grade some of the students journal entries. I quickly realized that a lot of these high school students cannot fully put sentences together. The education system in this country is a mess. There is absolutely no reason why any high school student should be set back in life because they have not had access to a proper education. I think about my nine year old cousin who goes to a Catholic school in the suburbs of Chicago and how at nine years old he's already so many steps ahead of these high school students and how unfair that is. These students are bright, and ambitious but unfortunately have not had the same opportunities as everyone else. I hope that by giving them these media production skills, allowing them to learn how to operate high-tech cameras, produce documentaries, use final cut pro, FSM is taking one step in closing this unfair achievement gap.

I'm excited to be a mentor this year and looking forward to an awesome time here at FSM! The environment here is amazing and everyone has been so supportive and kind!