purifying the mind

So today was great.
We finally reopened to our clients so we had a steady stream throughout the day.
I even got to shadow as Kristin worked with a new client on her resume and looking for jobs. I took a lot of mental notes. I thought working with clients would make me the most stressed. I mean this person's well being is in my hands, but I felt really at ease. I had to leave early though because me and shawn had a meeting with kevin to talk about the other organizations is the building and talk with him more about what we do.
So the building we are in is so awesome.
It began during the civil rights era in response to the lack ofeconomic resources and job training for African-Americans. They now have about a hundred sites worldwide. The building we are in is compromised of many services geared towards preparing people for the workforce. But they also have literacy programs and educational programs and the mayor's office of community services is located on the fifth floor. As I continue to learn more about more of the programs I'll try to highlight them here.
Here's a website which includes more details http://www.philaoic.org/aboutus.htm.

Today we learned more about the history of our North Philly office, as well as our partnership with Temple. One of the challenges we face is recruitment of volunteers and then keeping them involved and on board. We're going to be brainstorming some ideas for Temple. We lost our student organization status so it makes it more difficult for us to get on campus. Fortunately we were able to set up an appt. with a professor from LaSalle who wants to send all of his service learning students to our site, how awesome.

Tomorrow we have a conference call with my boss Delese so I'm preparing some notes for that.

I'm ready to get things rollin' but now I know more than ever that I have to pace myself.
In our discussion of previous site coordinators, we learned about some that experienced serious burnout. Let's hope that isn't my fate. Let me just make a pledge to myself to keep my life in balance, take breaks when I need to and ultimately take care of myself.
burrito time!