The End and New Beginnings

Again, I have to say sorry for the lack of posts.  I haven't had an internet connection since mid-week, and the amount of things to get done has put the blog on the back burner.  By the looks of the post title, you can tell some big things have been going on:  I am no longer in Compton but Boise, Idaho.  

Our first project has been terminated, and a long and complicated story goes with it.  I'm still working out how to put it in a nutshell so as not to bore the readers to tears and not tick off my superiors by being overly negative.  This is a public blog, and while I don't want to make AmeriCorps look bad by being critical of my sponsor it's almost impossible to explain the situation without doing so a little bit.

Anyhoo, when last many of you heard from me I was ending my first week with my project in Compton.  We had been paraded around by our sponsor to show the important people and possible donors of Compton that someone was here to help on the creation of a Disaster Management Staging Center (DMSC) and that it was time to jump on the bandwagon.  As a team we had been working really hard to come up with a survey for the average Compton resident as well as an interview for VIP's to find out what their status was for disaster preparedness as well as ideas for other community needs that the center could address.  We had also been planning very hard for ribbon cutting ceremony for the center where we could raise interest and disseminate the surveys that we had made.  

Unfortunately, we were coming up short on a lot of building blocks for our project.  We were only able to secure about $100 worth of food on behalf of NICE (our sponsor) for the event.  We were able to get printing services from City Hall, but ultimately they didn't allow us to print off our 3000 surveys-- only our flyers to promote the event.  Since the whole point was to get the surveys out, we had to fall on our sponsor to fill in the blanks.  Unfortunately he didn't have the resources.  

Let me give you a little background on our sponsor.  The non-profit we were working for was called the National Institute of Community Enlightenment (NICE).  It had been a project of James Davis, the man who I had said in previous blogs was working with us.  It turns out that NICE was almost a one-man-show run by Mr. James.  He had worked with others in the past on projects in New Orleans, but the members of his board had left by the time we got there.  This left him alone as the sole representative of NICE, meaning all the strengths and weaknesses of this one man were what we had to work with as a team.  

To start off about James, he is a very good man.  He has boundless enthusiasm and a great positive attitude that really kept us going when things didn't look great.  He also has a great vision.  This DMSC is a really important project that everyone on the team really wants to see made a reality. If the property that he has proposed lays fallow, it is a prime target for gang activity and crime to move in to a really nice neighborhood.  From what we learned from our interviews, Compton could really use as much support as it can on disaster prevention.  There is somewhat of a disconnect between the city officials and the public on the subject. The city does what it can to train people, but it can only train the people that are willing to come to the workshops that it puts on.  It was are hope that in building this place as a community center people would come for other needs and learn about disaster safety at the same time.   This was all part of James' vision, and it's a great idea.

What was the downfall of the project was that James was all ideas and little implementation.  He could be pretty disorganized at times-- every morning we had to create our own schedule for work to be done for the day and/or week.  While this really brought us together as a team, it wasn't supposed to be our job.  AmeriCorps members are more of the hands on a project and not the head.  Secondly, the project was unprepared for our arrival in both small and big ways.  Like I said before, James hadn't moved out much of this things before he had arrived and didn't move out until later on in the week.  This was a big stress for many of us because we didn't really have a space where we could be safe to say whatever we felt.  We had to put on airs pretty much 24/7 so as not to look bad in front of our sponsor.  This was ultimately small potatoes to the project in the long run but I think a good example. The big things were that the overarching goal of the project as well as the small goals (putting on the event) couldn't move forward because he hadn't secured the resources.  James was waiting for a $100,000 loan from city hall and was hoping that our presence in the city would speed things up for receiving it.  In retrospect, I don't think that amount would have been enough to get the building up to code for people to work in there.  Much of the building had been damaged by looters, and we didn't think it was safe for us to begin doing any work in there.  I think that it would take at least a half-a-million to a million-dollar capital campaign to have all the funds to make it happen.  Where we were in the project, James was paying for our living expenses as well as printing expenses out of pocket.  This is another testament to how committed he was, but it just wasn't a sustainable alternative.  He knew this, and on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving he let us know that he had begun the paperwork for project termination.  

In retrospect he did the right thing.  He still may be eligible for another NCCC team later on this year or next if he gets his act together.  I think he really needs some AmeriCorps Vista members to build up the office infrastructure and get him on task.  I hope that he can work things out, but for now I've mostly put the project behind me.  

Thanksgiving break was a nice get-away; it allowed me to blow off a little steam from the project and other issues in my life.  I haven't made it very public, but my girlfriend Kristy broke up with me at the start of the first project.  It was nice to clear my head by the beach for a few days and spend some time with my awesomely supportive teammates.  San Diego is a great area-- beautiful weather, nice beaches, the unforgettable Balboa park with lots of great museums and gardens.  There are a lot of nuts living there, but they're nicer and more easy-going than the other California nuts that I've met.  LA nuts are a little scary, and Sacramento nuts don't have beaches to chill out on.  There's a lot of public art:  it's just a great place to visit and walk around.  

After Thanksgiving, we've been moving at break-neck speed this last week to close out our last project and prepare for the next.  We've done about 18 hour of driving throughout the week to get from LA to Sacramento and Sacramento to Boise.  We've also spent a lot of time presenting our debriefing to the NCCC staff and and making a briefing about our next one.

The project that we are starting here in Boise is the Special Olympics 2009 World Winter Games.  We just started our training on Friday and have been assigned to subsets of the organization.  I've been assigned to Accomidations-- making sure that the 2500 athletes from 108 countries as well as family and coaches find a place to stay for the event.  I have almost no idea what this entails and will find out sometime tomorrow I hope.  I'm told that I might be immediately sent to McCall, ID to work out some hotel accomidations there for the snowshoe event that will take place there.  There are seven total events, I think: snowshoeing, alpine and cross-country skiing, snowboarding, floor hockey, figure and speed skating. Most of these take place in Boise, but a few are a couple hours outside in McCall and Sun Valley, ID.  I'm excited to see more of the state.  It's a beautiful place from what I've seen, and I really like Boise as a city(pronounced "Boy-See" not '-Zee", who knew?).  They have a very vibrant down-town, and it's full of young people from Boise State.  

Well, I think I've made a personal record for blog-length so I'll let you go.  I'm pretty stoked about this new project, though it hasn't all hit me yet.  Wish me luck.