Well this week has been a busy week for the most part. Not so busy that I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off, but busy enough that I'm not getting bored, which is always good. As they say, idle hands are the devil's playground.
Lets see, I have to think about what has happened all this week. I guess we can start on Saturday.
Saturday was our big Engaging and Sustaining Youth Leadership in Marathon County Summit. As far as I'm concerned it was a fantastic success. I wish I had pictures of this to show you, but they haven't been posted anywhere yet, and I personally didn't take any. I'll give you a brief overview of how the day went.
I got there early because I had to set up a booth about 4-H. There were a bunch of local organizations there with booths and leadership/engagement opportunities. We were there chatting with the participants for about twenty minutes. It was a good networking tool. After that, as a group, we had introductions and hear our keynote speaker. For this we were fortunate enough to have Congressman Sean Duffy as our speaker. I use the term fortunately not in a political sense, but in the sense of "we were fortunate to get a member of the United States Congress to talk to us." My own political views are not of any importance in this blog. As far as his speech went it was really great. The topic, community engagement, was something that he was passionate about. He didn't turn it into a debate about dems and reps, he kept it neutral, and even mentioned his experience on the Real World....I may have to YouTube that. After he spoke we had a panel of four local leaders in our community, the county board chair, a big wig at the local technical college, an owner of one of the bars in town, and a big wig in the United Way. They just discussed what engaged meant and what are some ways that the community is engaged and what are some ways we could be more engaged, that sort of thing. It was really good and informative.
After that we broke out into song....no wait...break out sessions! That was it! These sessions were divided into three different categories. They were business, government, and non-profit. I sat in on the non-profit conversation. In this one we talked mostly about boards and whether or not young people sit on the boards of organizations. I think the 4-H Leader's Federation is one of the better ones about that because almost half of the Federation is youth. There are four youth and four adults from each district, then there is also the officers who are all adults, but everyone gets a fair say and a fair vote, so its pretty well distributed.
From this point we had lunch, then we had a presentation about all the data we collected from the focus groups. The results were pretty much that people wanted to be personally invited to events or board meetings and that there needed to be a single place where all the events were advertised. The last thing on our agenda was the World Cafe. This was a round table discussion. For every question you sit at a different table with different people. For this I was a table host, this meant that I stayed at the table I was at and I made sure the conversation kept going. I enjoyed it and we got a goodly amount of conversation from it. After this I actually left because I wasn't feeling well. Overall, it seemed to be a very good summit that had good information presented and taken in. Go us!
This week I have been getting ready for the Financial Wellness Conference. Although I am not actually teaching my session, I am getting all the handouts ready for the person who is. Our session is called "Back to Basics: Saving Money the Old Fashioned Way." My presenter is going to bring examples of different ways to reuse and recycle or upcycle things people have around the house. She will also talk about ways to save money in the kitchen, specifically using a MASTER MIX. This is just a basic mix that you add wet ingredients too. Not only does this save money, but it saves time as well. It is quite handy and sounds easy. We are also discussing the thousands of uses for baking soda and vinegar. Ok, maybe not thousands, but at least hundreds.
Other than this, the next thing I have coming up is kind of a side project that I'm doing on my own, not as part of my VISTA term. I am trying to put together an urban 4-H club...well as urban as it gets here. I have my informational meeting scheduled for Feb. 2nd. Hopefully there is interest and hopefully it all works out! So I have to plan for that. I've been thinking about it, and I kind of wish I could divide myself into two and one half will take the youth and one half would take the adults....apart from that, I don't really know who to ask to help me. Maybe I could convince my dad to entertain the kids...
Until then!
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