Hello September at Project HQ

Ben Sheldon — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:39:52 +0000

Boston has just started getting chill again, which is unfortunate, since the weather in Boston is near-usually pretty darn cold. Of course, I don't know that about 9 hours out of my day because I'm in an air-conditioned, fluorescent lighted alter-space where the rules of nature our blocked out by cinderblock and drop ceilings. Fortunately, despite those conditions here at UMass Boston we've getting a lot of work done at CTC VISTA Project HQ.

I've been working overtime getting all our exiting VISTA's paperwork in order and making sure that they have a smooth transition into post-VISTA life. There are a lot of nuts-and-bolts details that I've been trying to get done and, considering this is my first year ever of taking on these responsibilities, it's been a little tough. But I'm pretty confident that we've gotten all i's dotted.

Classes here at UMass Boston just started last week and we've been inundated with questions of "Do you know where Professor so and so's class is?" (Answer: "No"). But fortunately the influx of new students has allowed us to try to pick up a couple interns to help out with some of our Project goals this year. We're part of the College of Public and Community Service, and a few of the professors have been channeling students our way to help design some community building, volunteer management and supervisor trainings. We're still in the planning stages, but I'm looking forward to having some good materials to push out to y'all.

These new interns will hopefully keep us moving forward with innovative and useful projects since we're losing some hard-working and friendly faces here at HQ. Danielle Martin, VISTA Leader extraordinaire, has left us for MIT and our support specialist Erin Taylor is beginning law school at St. John's in NYC. They have contributed great work to the CTC VISTA Project and communities across the country and we'll miss them greatly.

Lastly, I've been trying to keep up with everything everyone is up to, both through the Field Reports, talking with VISTA Leaders and on those rare and pleasant occasions where I'm in direct communication with y'all. I've been really impressed by the the projects you have been working on, and, equally as important, the reporting and communicating you have been doing, through our website, listserv and with the VISTA Leaders. I hope you are finding it useful and interesting and please keep up the great work, err, service!

FINALLY blogging!

Jessica McCoy — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:53:33 +0000

Wow, I haven't blogged since November.

I've been meaning to do it. Thinking about doing it. Feeling like I should do it. But now I'm actually doing it. A nice quiet Friday afternoon presents the perfect time to blog.

So, what have I been up to? Planning workshops, teaching workshops, going to meetings, working on curriculum materials, and helping with a website project for digital storytelling facilitators. That's the past few months in a nutshell.

To expand on a few aspects:

Workshops: I guess that teaching workshops begins to cross over into the "direct service" category, but workshops are the heart of what we do at Center for Digital Storytelling, so if I didn't participate in some of them I wouldn't be very helpful to the organization. Teaching in the workshops has shown me what stuff people consistently trip over in the software, which helps me know how to structure our new software guides. It also has shown me how much work is involved in putting on workshops, especially those customized for a specific group. There's literally months of email exchanges, meetings, logistics planning, and recruiting before the workshop takes place. Then there's three incredibly intense days of work, and maybe a week or so of tying up the loose ends. (More if the project involves special curriculum materials or a custom DVD)

Anyway, you all don't really care about all of that. What I think may be relevant is the point that I'm sure all of you are observing on your own: nonprofits are hard work. It seems that there's never enough time, money, expertise, or staff to get everything done. Now I understand why CDS has tutorials that are probably 3 years old and full of typos. It's because just running the day-to-day operations of the organization takes so much work that there's not much energy left over for creating the tools that would actually make our work easier. I'm still trying to figure out how to balance that. Example: If I take three hours of my day today, I can get one rough-draft tutorial fully edited, printed, and ready to use. That means I'll be three hours behind on everything else, but I won't have to scramble at the next workshop to print out a half-done tutorial (and neither will my coworkers.) If I take three days to get all of our lab computers in tip-top shape, we'll probably be set for the next couple months. But I'll never have three free days because of meetings, phone calls, deadlines, etc.

To solve some of these problems, my very supportive supervisors suggested that I hire some volunteer interns to help with the more basic tasks so I could focus on the tutorials and other capacity building that requires some know-how. This seemed like a great idea, but now I've spent a good chunk of time soliciting interns, interviewing candidates, and training the three that I selected. And the one day a week that they are here, I get less done because they have a lot of questions. I'm hoping that this is because they are new, and as they get more experienced they will be more self-sufficient.

So, to sum up, I'm feeling a bit overworked. I think I need to start a yoga class or something to destress a bit. The good news is I'm learning lots, even if sometimes I'm learning it the hard way.

Digital Arts Service Corps - interns

Hello September at Project HQ

FINALLY blogging!