Welcome to D's new VISTA Leader blog!

Thanks to the beauty of open source CMS and the CTC VISTA Project's ability to think forward, we have a new website that will not only be more exciting to read and easier to participate in.  As many of you know, my role is a changin' - I'll have the privilege of serving as VISTA leader for a second year of service.  I'll be at  Project headquarters two day a week (Mondays & Wednesdays to start) to keep the new resource portal afloat and active.  I also have a little mini-project a cookin' with some folks at the Alliance for Community Media to help support a new Digital Distribution Network of youth media content with folks from MNN in NYC and all over the country.  We're hoping to recruit a specific group of VISTAs to go into cable access stations develop youth programs and the use of peer-to-peer networks to share content.

The other three days a week, I'll be serving with massIMPACT, a non-profit housed in MassHousing on Beacon Street downtown, where I'll be managing a new web portal project for digital storytelling facilitators (http://storiesforchange.net/) and supporting the training of more community based facilitators.  I'm also hoping to get out to the community more and do some more work actually with folks in community technology & media centers.  

Sound busy enough? 

Oh and why the monkey? Well, in the strange congruence of my month of August, I attended both a laid back gathering of digital storytelling facilitators in beautiful Ukiah, CA and a federally rigid Americorps leadership training in DC.  But no matter how different each sounds from each other, they both contained self reflection and introduction into new buzz word lexicons.  So when Paul told me to "find my power animal", I stumbled upon it at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park at an exhibit called Think Tank.  Basically, it detailed how we define "thinking" and explored whether animals other than humans meet the criteria.  So the lesson learned...if a monkey can think intelligently, then it should be easier for humans (especially those who work on community technology & media) to do the same.