¡Arriba Latinitas!

Greetings from El Paso, Texas! Another month at Latinitas and it feels like I have been here forever! I enjoy my job and the best part is to meet new faces who are interested in helping out Latinitas. I have been working on recruiting new volunteers interested in helping their community through Latinitas. It’s hard to find people who want to give up some time for a good cause. I have also been making new activities for our after school clubs. I have to come up with at least 4 a month for a total of 48 fresh new activities. The goal is for me to compile about 300 activities and make some new ones. It looks easy but it’s hard. I have also been working in a parent packet which includes a letter telling the parents who we are and what we do (a lot of parents don’t know where their daughters go afterschool, so we thought this would help us with donations) and also a registration form. Every form and application that I create I have to translate to Spanish, which isn’t easy, Spanish is my first language but having to translate and keep the same meaning it has in English, is hard. Also, I have been training new Club Leaders, so the training and keeping updates with them has been challenging, but fun.

Fortunately, we have had a good turn out in searching for volunteers within local community colleges and university. They have sent their students to volunteer with us and we have connected them with the clubs as mentors. Some of the challenges though have been recruiting girls. We have a PR intern that works in promoting our clubs, she has done so much but attendance is still low. We have a low budget and can’t have ice cream socials to bring in girls this semester so I don’t know how to bring them in without incentives. I am worried about girl attendance in the clubs and not having enough girls and just having a lot of volunteers that don’t have girls to mentors. I am also worried about coming up with fresh new activities and not make them repetitive. I have asked volunteers to help me in sharing their creativity so I want to see how that goes. Also, I have heard some volunteers get discouraged by not seeing girls so sometimes I worry I am not doing a good job keeping volunteers interested.

On a personal note, there was hail in El Paso about 2 weeks ago, golf size. I also got a kidney infection around the same time. I am better now but now the hail totally dented my car and cracked my windshield. I didn’t know that hail would come to El Paso (it’s a desert where it never rains) so I don’t have full coverage. I am now driving s total loss Chrysler Sebring but who knows what waits for me next.

attached: Letter to Parents in both English and Spanish

Comment from Mira Allen on October 8, 2009 - 11:43am

Hi Claudia! Sorry to hear about your kidney and windshield. I hope your luck is looking up.