Monday, March 21, 2011
College Mentors lead a team of high school students in planning
water related service projects that will become part of Global
Youth Service Day (April 2011)
These last two weeks at Saint Joan Antida have been hectic. I was ill last week and unfortunately could not meet with my girls. However, they were able to come together and create a display poster board to show faculty the importance of a rain garden. This is paramount to our project for we have yet to get permission from the high school to install the garden, so I am proud that they accomplished this. Having said that, this week when I met with them to actually give the presentation, the poster board was lost or stolen from the library where it was stored! Like any good story, we came together in a flash, printed off some stored facts and information about our project and were able to pull together a proposal. The girls were fantastic and really gave some great ideas. However, there are concerns about maintenance, especially during the summer when the school is closed. So, before we can go to the Sisters, the group needs to brainstorm on who will take care of this during the break.
We also finished our budget worksheet and determined to shoot for the stars and see what we can afford. We came up with a list of all the native plants we want to implement, how much compost we need, as well as the mulch and soil. Again, we need to make sure we are able to use the lot that we requested and will hopefully know within two weeks! I emailed the peer facilitator to give a heads up and have the girls thinking of not only maintenance concerns but alternatives as well for a backup plan. Overall, we are working well and I am hoping for the best!
-Mary Jane Kunath
Today was the start of the 3rd week of our “Water Bottle Challenge”. We are a little less than half way to making our goal of collecting 100 plastic bottles. To gain more recognition for the Water Bottle Challenge we decided to dedicate ½ our time this week to creating as many posters as we could and the other ½ to hanging them up all over the school. Once this was done we finished up our resource list and also came up with all the prices. My team members want to build a rain barrel structure just by using the barrel and then creating the rest with recyclable bottles. On Global Youth Service Day the team plans to show their structure to a few 6th grade classes and come up with an educational presentation. This presentation will describe what a rain barrel is, how it works, and why we use them. Next week we are planning on contacting community partners of Lead to Succeed for a barrel donation.
-Kelly Crowley
After defining our project in the previous weeks, we finally were able to decide on the shampoo, conditioner, and soap to create from scratch. With many of the girls wanting something that would smell good, we chose many of the organic soap and shampoo products that contained coconut or honey. After getting together all the ingredients needed for each item (shampoo, conditioner, and soap), we took each amount and multiplied it to increase our sample size to be able to give away approximately 50 samples. Even though many of the girls have been sick or gone, our group is still getting things accomplished and once we receive the ingredients, we will be able to begin making our hygiene kit. Some things we still need to work on are, when the group will be able to get together and make these products and what exactly we want to type on our “educational note cards” when we hand out our kits.
-Lucas White
Things are moving along great with the group of girls that I have the pleasure of working with at St. Joan Antida. They have gotten together all the ingredients they need to make environmentally friendly hand soap and we gave it a try for the first time this past Thursday. We won't really see the finished product for a couple of weeks, but we are very excited to see how the soap turns out. The girls are also working on a poster board presentation that they are planning on sharing with the freshmen classes for Global Youth Service Day. They will be sharing with their fellow classmates what they are doing and why. It has been very cool seeing them pull all of the information together. The group has made so much progress and I am very excited to see how far they get in their project in the next few weeks.
-April Heath
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