so it's been a while...

First off, many apologies to all the VISTA gods out there, seeing as it has been many moons since I've posted a field report. In fact, the last time I reported I was working at a different place. Oops. So, fast-forward over all the messy job-changes (let's keep things positive) and suffice to say that I'm now working at Neighborhoods Partnership Network (NPN), a small non-profit in New Orleans that boasts a certain Jules Goins as a VISTA alum. Only good things can come of that, right?

NPN recently (a few months ago) launched a website -- www.npnnola.com -- that allows neighborhood groups and nonprofits to share news, events, photos, info, etc, so I'm pretty much taking over publicity and outreach for that. Right now one of my projects is to get in touch with as many community organizations as possible and try to do a "web workshop" with them -- help them set up a profile and teach them how to post their news and events to the site, in hopes of increasing the site traffic and make it a more useful tool. These have been pretty good so far -- I definitely need to make a lot more phone calls and set up a lot more meetings but people are generally very enthusiastic, esp people from smaller groups who otherwise don't have a place to publicize their goings-on on the Internet. It's great to have the opportunity to meet community leaders, too.

I'm also responsible for producing our weekly e-newsletter -- compiling community news, events, grant info and writing a short "hot topic" about something going on in the world of New Orleans neighborhoods. We use constantcontact for this and I've found it very user friendly.

Other stuff: I've been writing some letters of intent and grant applications, which I really enjoy. Plus, the organization needs $$. (Who doesn't?) I've also been tracking our web traffic, newsletter readership, etc. I'm just using google analytics now which I think is more than detailed enough for our needs. Other than that, just doing general management, administrative tasks, etc, has kept me busy.

Hope you all enjoyed giving thanks.