Blue is our color

Happy family after the generous church potluck and coffee hour at the volunteer house this Sunday

Charlotte joins the church choir (and random musings)

So I thought that this post would be about me joining the choir but it was boring. I need to clarify that statement, joining the choir wasn’t boring, in fact it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately when I tried to write about joining the choir my attempt was deadly boring. So I’ll make it short and sweet. I’m in the choir. We practice on Thursday nights and Sunday morning. The director and the rest of the choir were very welcoming, talented and wonderful.

So instead of going in depth into my adventures in signing soprano, I’ll say that I had an exhausting but promising first week of work. I am still in the middle of a training/orientation at Samaritan Ministry. I have a good concept of what my job will be (case worker!) I have an office, business cards(!) and a lot more to learn. I sat in with a volunteer case worker on Friday feel like a learned quite a bit.
I will have much more to say about my job later this week, after I sit in with all the lead case workers at all three of our offices.

Most of this weekend was spent hiding inside our house from torrential downpours of rain. And sleeping. Today I had frozen yogurt and a great chat with a fellow University of Puget Sound grad. It was great to feel connected to my college when I am in fact so far away.

Another item of note is that my lack of a sense of direction is legendary. I can get lost in Walla Walla. I don’t know where the public library was growing up. I can get lost on the way home from the dentist. The idea of me loose in a big city is a little scary to me and I’m sure to some of you. So this directionally challenged girl has been conquering her fear of the metro busses. I think I’ve found the ideal route to work. And I only got a little lost finding my office from the bus on the first day. Hopefully a more focused response to my new life in DC is on the way in the near future.

Bread for the City

Hey all,

Here is Bread for the City's blog:
http://www.breadforthecity.blogspot.com/

We should connect somehow.

Forced to go grocery shopping... so others might eat

I have to begin with a brief recap of our first group grocery shopping experience on Monday afternoon. We have decided to start off sharing food and see how that works, as it should save money and be much easier with our limited kitchen space. We created an extensive list of grocery items on Monday morning, to which the only items I was able to contribute that were my absolute necessities were pickles, banana peppers, and marinated artichoke hearts. Luckily Deanna's boyfriend was generous enough to allow us to pile a total of 6 passengers in his car, and a return trip with a trunk full of groceries. I've gone grocery shopping a few times in my life, really only during senior year of college when I tried to have food in my house but failed miserably and fell prey to take-out and WaWa sandwiches each and every night. So my feelings on grocery shopping are less than complacent, it actually makes me really stressed and uncomfortable.

Although I have to say that our shopping trip went better than expected. I only broke into a cold sweat a few times, during loaded decision making like which line to go on and what kinds of milk to buy. Charlotte was in charge of the list and at one point turned to me and said, "Okay Jen I have a task for you...," which was a question met with horror and anxiety by me until she just asked me to go find milk. This was a relief, I just followed the refrigerating around the store until I found it. I think the most challenging single moment of my grocery shopping experience was settling for store brand olive oil, instead of the Philipo Berio Italian olive oil that is always found in my home. I immediately picked that one up without thinking, when my fellow stipend-bound roommates reminded me that we should check the label, and oh look it turns out that the generic brand olive oil is $2 cheaper. However, I did have some of it on my pasta this evening and although it was a bit sub-par, it wasn't completely intolerable. So I survived the shopping trip, but I did offer grocery money plus a monetary bonus payment for shopping and cooking to my roommates for next week, just so I wouldn't have to go back.

Most importantly, we all started our jobs yesterday. Everyone seems to be enjoying it, meeting lots of new people and getting lots of new information thrown at us, but we're all very impressed with our organizations and the many social services they offer, as well as excited to be a part of their wonderful work for the year. I went into the SOME (So Others Might Eat) Headquarters yesterday morning for orientation with some other new volunteers and employees, and then left around 11 am for a retreat to West Virginia. We learned about the history and facets of SOME, which was very interesting because I hadn't realized how very many facitlities they have. They began as a soup kitchen giving out food, and have expanded over the last 38 years to include a full range of social services including about 20 housing programs of every kind, addiction recovery, counseling, dental, medical, employment training, mental health, and emergency services. It was started by a man handing out sandwiches on the streets of DC to the homeless, and has grown to an organization of 275 members that has lasted almost double the lifespan of most non-profits. The CET specifically is basically a school for low-income people who have trouble getting employed. They come every day for about 6 months and learn basic skills needed to get a job, how to be professional, how to dress, how to conduct themselves on the phone and in interviews, and are taught in one of three employment areas. These are phone customer service, medical administrative assistant, and building maintenance and repair. When they graduate, the CET helps them to find jobs.

On the retreat, there were about 9 of us from the CET (Center for Employment Training), including myself and another recent graduate who is part of the Avodah Volunteer Program. Also, the staff of 2 of SOME's transitional housing residences were at the retreat as well, making it a total of about 25. The theme was Stewardship, which is one of SOME's four core values. Over the course of the evening and following day, we discussed what stewardship means, how we feel we are stewards in our organization, how we can be better stewards, and also groups of staff members developed Stewardship Projects to better their work and make a certain process more efficient. It was a nice way to start off on a first day, getting to see everyone relaxed and out of the work setting on their yearly retreat. It was also a good way to be introduced to what happens at the CET and the way the team works together, and gave me a great positive outlook on the strength and the success of the CET as well as making me excited to contribute to such an awesome group of people.

My title is Program Assistant, and as I understand as of now I'll have two main job functions. One is dealing with alumni - keeping contact with graduates of the CET, making sure they have found jobs and been able to keep their jobs, and getting them to come back in if they are having trouble, in which case I would review their resume and the way they are searching for jobs and help where I can. Another thing I will be doing, that we really just developed today as the stewardship project from the retreat, is monitoring the students' progress each quarter by reviewing a set of goals they will have defined for themselves at the start of their time at CET. These goals and improvements will be in four focus areas: basic education, skill training, career development, and human development. They do meet with the instructors one-on-one after competency tests to review their progress, but I will act as a liason between the students and the rest of the staff, helping the students in their individual path towards reaching their goals. Tomorrow I will report to work (after I figure out how to get way down to Southeast) for the first time, and I'm quite excited to get started!

Let them eat cake (and anything else the board wants to give them)

A brief introduction to the Westmoreland volunteer corps. If you are a member of the vol corps board, my mother, Jen’s grandmother, Noah’s great aunt, or anyone who already knows the nitty gritty details of our new lives feel free to wait for more scintillating later posts. For everyone else here it is.

Five strangers, brought together for one purpose: lighting our candles in a new city. That sounds both ridiculous and silly. But really, we are five recent college graduates from different parts of the United States and different stories about how we chose to dedicate a year to service.

We live in a communal house right next to the Westmoreland Church. We have full time jobs at different service agencies. I (Charlotte) am working at Samaritan Ministry, Deanna at Bread for the City, Noah at Sasha Bruce Youthwork, Jen at So Others Might Eat (SOME) Center for Employment Training (CET) and Rachel at DC Rape Crisis Center.

The first question we seem to get is usually: how can you survive as a volunteer in DC? Answer: we receive a stipend and health insurance from our agency and support form Westmoreland Church along with a home to live in.

We want this blog to be a forum for our friends, family, and the community of the Westmoreland Church to stay updated about our work and learn a little more about all of us.

We start work on Tuesday. We’ve been busy. Noah has been biking around our new area, Deanna just got home from a free Symphony concert, Rachel is still unpacking and Jen fell in love with the pandas at the (free!) National Zoo. We are almost all moved in and unpacked.

Stay tuned for updates about everyone’s first day of work (Jen is going on an overnight reatreat with SOME) and how we "fare" on the bus system (We're preparing for office humor).

- Amy Shard