Community issue and Community partner

There is an issue in education and backgrounds in the community. There is an issue in how we take care of our households. There is an issue that affect our kids. There is a big issue that needs to be resolved. The issue is not having control of what goes on in our kids lives and not paying attention to their childhood. Kids are growing out without any parental attention. They are having trouble with learning, they have no role model, they don't receive this from school. They have problems in their outer parts of their house-holds. With this broad issues, we could learn more stuff about this community. We could learn that the community is eager to work with us. We are able to work with the community thanks to our community partner. This community doesn't want any help from people they don't know. Our community partner helped us interact and work with families so that we are able to work with their kids. The community families don't want strangers helping their kids. The problem with this kids was that they need permission from their families so we had to deal with that. This was a community issue that we addressed to our community partner, and he helped us by talking to them and making the families more secure about what we are doing.
We learned that even thought this community has many difficulties, we can overcome them by working with our community advisor. He deals with their families so that we can deal with their kids. We can overcome the overall problems and we can understand what is what we are working with. We know there will always be problems and struggles in the community, but the output will be more important than what we have to deal with. My group and I learned about the community, and we learned how to solve the issues. We also learned what are the good things of working with them. This as overall is a good experience and now we know what we will deal with in the future.

Communication Monthly Blog

This blog will be reflected on the presentation that Ed Derr gave to us on Friday, February 17, 2012. He talked mainly about communication and how it can make a difference by communicating in the right way. He gave us tips and he made us do activities to see what kind of animal we are. It was really interesting to see the tips and how it can all help to us to have a better connection with the people who surround us. All of this tips were helpful for me to understand how communication works with my friends. Since he gave us those tips I felt that I can understand and they could understand me better. All by a simple tip by just asking them the right questions and paying attention. I have tried with my roommates the communicating tips, and it totally works. We now tell what bothers us and what we need to change. That way we avoid having problems and discussions between us. Also the conflict solving sheet helped to see what really bothers us. We noticed that in everyones sheet we had something that bothered from someone of us. This make us realize that we were not communicating right. From then on and with the tips he gave us we were able to communicate better and now we tell what bothers from the rest of us. Overall it was a helpful experience that by small tips can help everyone of us.

Juan Fernando Calderon Monthly Journal Blog about Community Partner

On the class from 1/27 there were several points that could be taken to consideration of making connections and diversity. In this class we made an activity that was called "cross the line", were the speaker made questions to the group and either you needed to cross the line if the answer was yes, or stay were you were if the answer was no. This activity helped to me and I believed to my group because I could understand more about my summit peers and their backgrounds. Also this helped me see how a diverse group of people we had in our class. It was a hard activity were some questions were compromising that sometimes people didn't want to respond. This showed me it takes value to cross the line and to accept what the reality to what the question is. The key point I took is that with a simple activity like that you can get to know a group of 40 people. Thats what we can do in getting to know our Pipkin students with simpler activities but get to bond with them with simple activities like this. 


Our community partner does not have a link but the Springfield Public Schools does have information about Pipkin Middle School. 


http://springfieldpublicschoolsmo.org/relocating/pipkin.htm


Mission Statement: Excellent teaching and learning for all.


You can get involved with our program by visiting the school and working together with us so that we can gather a bigger group to work with more kids instead that only 15. This also could raise awareness in Springfield Public Schools so that the school system can be changed and there will be better education and easier access for college. By gathering more people we can show the society that kids are our future and that we need to work with them. Thats why we need to gather people who is interested in joining our program or could join us in the weekdays that we go to Pipkin to work with the kids, one hour a day, Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.

Joplin Smart Mob

The monday we joined Smart mob to volunteer in Joplin, was a week we will all remember. It started by passing through the devastated buildings and how we can see the images of what the tornado whipped out. It was a life changing experience because all of the great things we could do to help the community. We worked helping moving and placing grass sods on the garden. We took about an our to plant all of the sods and to create the garden in the surrounding of the memorial site. This was a hard work which I enjoyed because we could work as teams for a more effective work. After that we helped in other site to move the dirt and to place more grass sods to create the exterior parts of the building. It was a long day but it all had its reward and it was helping a community that needed help from everyone. This is an experience that makes you feel complete inside because you don't care if they pay you or they say thank you, but you will feel that you did your job with the people who need it the most. As an experience this is one that could take your stress off by helping the community and could make you see that to help other people is what makes you really happy, and to see their smiles after a long time of suffering thats what makes me happy.

SMART Goal

"Play entertaining and fun games with the group of 15 kids every 2 weeks in this current semester for 1 hour each day. This will make kids to be more engaged and attracted to the program."

Juan Fernando Calderon

Juan Fernando Calderon Blog: Leadership Post

"To use your knowledge and wisdom is leadership, to make the best out of every team mate and work as a group, its a leader."(Juan Fernando Calderon, 2011)