diamonds on the soles of her shoes

It's cold.
Last night I walked home from Lush, I do that occasionaly. It's a safe walk although it involves 3o blocks and crossing a bridge. Which I am most definetely not a fan of. After about 20 blocks I went to sweep a piece of hair behind my ear when I realized my ear was numb!

I passed out when I got home, which is becoming a constant occurence. And this morning it was so difficult to get out of bed. However I qualify coming into work an hour late with the fact that we have a Board meeting today after work followed by the volunteers HuHAW event. So in the end it all evens out.

Today I spent most of the day preparing for my upcoming one on ones with the volunteers. I'm interested in hearing from each one of them about how their experience is going. In addition, I feel that our service to our clients needs some refining so hopefully this will be an opportunity to go over with my volunteers areas where they can improve. I'm excited about sitting down with each of them but collecting all of the information to create these one-on-ones was daunting. In addition to developing the questions and assessing what objectives I wanted out of this, I'm going over all of the meetings that the volunteers have had with clients since they started. We keep detailed records of every person we meet with. We then use this data to compile monthly reports and send information to stakeholders and the National Office uses it for assessments and such. It's cool because we're able to assess exactly what our office is doing and in what areas we can improve.
I also got some tips from some of the other offices who also do one on ones and then read some very helpful articles and hopefully can develop some sort of structure to implement this things into changes into the offices.
Fortunately all of our volunteers have been doing well but I will have to do some iffy "growth edges" feedback.

I'm also working on designing the leadership structure of our office which is fun....

All of this makes me very tired, tired at the end of the day. It's a lot of thinking which use to energize me but now just poops me out.
I'm excited because Patricia Nichols is coming into town tomorrow night and me her and Josh Jax are going down to South Street for some cheesesteaks. I haven't had a good Philly cheesesteak in a while and I'm getting antsy. Just thinking about steak and cheesewiz and fried onions and good rolls (salivating). Oh yeah.

Our new boss Josh said something last week that has had me in a musing state. He noted that in the case of our volunteers there are some who come to see the world and others who come to save the world. He also noted that those who come to see usually fair better then those who came to save. This conversation evolved from another conversation we were having about volunteer development and engagement. In our organizayion, as I'm sure is the case in many organizations, there is this need to balance how much we are focused on volunteers with how much we are focused on the work we are doing.
In my personal opinion I think our volunteers are in that seeing the world state, where they look at service as an opportunity to learn and grow. However I could be projecting. I look at my service opportunities as an chance to learn and grow. I know I didn't come here to save the community but rather to serve the community. I brought this up in my weekly report and my boss asked me, how was I going to keep this at the forefront of my mind. I'm thinking about starting off most mornings with a meditation about what it means to serve. Or at least take some time in the day to do it. It's very important for me to remember this and to remain humble about what I'm doing. Although I'm also aware that I should pay attention two what things I have to give. And learn how to further develop them.

Okay time to end up the day. Bye friends!

Song: Mexico by James Taylor