Boys and Girls Club Project (First Blog of 2009)

Although working with the boys and girls club was not my first choice for a civic engagement project I am getting really excited about it. My main goal for this project is to provide help and support to the boys and girls club and the kids that utilize their services. I also hope to be able to develop at least one meaningful relationship with a kid I meet at the club. I expect this relationship to be as beneficial for me (and quite possibly more beneficial for me) as it is for the kid I befriend. I expect to learn a whole lot form all the kids I meet at the club.

I am very open to suggestions as to how our civic engagement should play out, however I do have a couple of possible scenarios in mind. I see a number of advantages to allowing individual or small groups of Paideia students to develop their own activities, projects, programs, etc for the club. The main advantage of this is that it will allow each Paideia student to share with the club the skills that are unique to them. This method of organization is also advantageous because it will help us to engage and meet the needs off all different kids (and consequently a larger number of kids). Some of us may be interacting with students that enjoy sports and physical activities, while others of us may be forging relationships with students who prefer more artistic pursuits. A third advantage to this scenario is that it eliminates the need for us all to agree on a specific area of project that we wish to pursue. As we learned in choosing an agency to work with it is very difficult (if not impossible) for us all to agree on any one thing. I understand that this idea may meet some resistance, as many members of the cohort believe it is important that we all share a common experience for our civic engagement project. However, I feel that the scenario I have proposed is the “best of both worlds” because we will have a common environment in which our experiences take place, but we will all have sufficiently different experiences that we can share these experiences with each other and learn from others’ experiences. I am particularly interested in (and somewhat bias towards) this way of organizing our project, because I have already made some preliminary plans for my own individual project at the club. I plan on tutoring a girl in geometry this semester.

If we choose to utilize the method of organization I’ve proposed most of the parameters of our project are flexible according to what individual or groups of Paideia students choose to do. In other words, some students could organize structured activities while others do non-structured activities; some could work with kids one at a time while others work in groups; some of us could go to the club alone while others go with other cohort members. I think that in order to prevent “social loafing” and so that our efforts remain at least somewhat united we should all present what we plan to do and how it works out to each other at our cohort meetings. As for how often and how long we should do our projects I think one hour every other week might work well. This way students could go on the Tuesdays we don’t have Paideia so our schedules remain fairly consist. Also students could choose if they would rather go every other week or once a week for roughly 30 minutes.

As for questions and concerns, I will be very interested to here from the club representative at our next meeting about what he sees as the primary need of the club, as well as his ideas of how we can meet those needs. I would also be interested to hear the opinions of the kids who use the club. What activities do they like and not like? What are things they do now at the club (and have done in the past) that they really like and want to do more of? What are things that they haven't liked so much? I also wonder what are some mistakes that previous volunteers at the club have made (so we can avoid those mistakes), and what types of projects and programs have had the greatest success (so we can consider incorporating some of those aspects). At this point I am feeling pretty confident and I don't really have too many concerns about the project; I'm excited to begin.