rain!!

It's raining pretty badly today and there is such a chill in the air.

This morning I went to the Brookings Institute report on Immigration in Philadelphia. It was also intended by the Mayor who gave a brief overview of immigration in the city. It was interesting overall. Some facts I learned: 1/2 a million immigrants currently live ni Philadelphia which is 9% of the population. A lot of the immigrants in the city are actually refugees from countries such as Ukraine. 15% of the children in the region are 2nd generation 43% of them do not speak English very well. In addition Philadelphia immigrants have same employment rates but households who are headed by immigrants have to work much harder than American citizens because they usually have lower paying jobs.

The overview of the report was followed by a panel discussion of the issues in immigration in the city where some of the main issues brought up were connecting these new citizens with services in the city, the fact that most of the immigrants are coming in with a lot of work history and job experience.

The interesting part was that at the end an immigrant from Africa stood up and talked about his attempts to gain citizenship. He only has a GED and so can only get jobs that are in teh 5- $6 an hour range. At this rate there is no way he can afford his citizenship fees. It was an interesting dilemma which, after all of this discussion and dialogue and interetsing policy points, no one had a solution for this man. I left the event slightly discouraged.

Our new boss has started and it's exciting. We did another strategy session because of the recent economic issues and the new challenges posed for our office. We did this thing called SWOT which is an analysis of our strengths, weakenesses, opportunities and threats. It led to some good discussion including that of the challenges in communication and work styles between me and my co...

I'm leaving for DC tonight and I'm realy excited and hoping that I can get to the bus on time. I have a meeting with my boss today and it's already 3:30.
I've been working on a list of things I'm excited about doing in Gainesville when I go back in January. I was looking over it and I noticed the first words of my list goes spend, spend, spend, go, go, go, go, run. Really! So I need to reasses that..

Okay, off to get some things done before the end of the day...