Happy MLK Day!!
On MLK day, everyone gets the day off, except AmeriCorps!
So for the past few months, I have been on a planning committee that organized a huge day of service for MLK Day. Our goal was to engage 1000 volunteers to beautify 3 schools: Simon ES, Hart MS, and Ballou HS. There is already a City Year team at Simon, however we are trying to get
teams at Hart and Ballou. Beautifying these schools helps us build a
relationship with these schools and the administration.
I was on the Ballou team where the bulk of the volunteers were. We came up with projects, called companies for donations, organized corps members, did prep work, and did mega troubleshooting.
Today, all our hard work paid off! I was a Zone Leader where I managed 5 projects, 115 volunteers, and 14 corps members who were directly leading the projects/volunteers.
In total, we engaged about 850 volunteers, including sponsors, high school students, City Year Alums, and VIPs such as,
Charles Bolden was able to be in my Zone working on one of my projects!
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| Charles Bolden, NASA, with me, Lowly Peasant. |
And now for some project pictures:
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| During prep day, there were some times where we scrambled to find jobs to keep people busy. Here, my some of my corps members are being troopers and doing the menial (but necessary) task of mass cutting. |
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| Wendy Spencer brought out her selfie stick at Opening Ceremony. |
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| Volunteers painted 35 of these college banners to be hung in Ballou's cafeteria. Colleges are mostly HBCUs or in the DMV area. |
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| We got 4000 condoms donated to make sexual health kits. The kits will go to Ballou HS students. |
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| Eric and Joe with painted book covers to be hung in the library. |
One of the committee members, Millie, designed the following two murals. They were her brain babies of the day and turned out well.
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| Room divider mural. We were worried about shading on this design and the next one, but the volunteers really impressed us! |
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| Other side of the sun mural. |
Chandler, one of the Project Leaders, had a great idea to make giant "BALLOU" letters and post them on a hill like the Hollywood sign. It was his brain baby of the day and it looks awesome! The process involved a taking a jigsaw to plywood, painting, nailing, and cementing in posts.
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| Digging holes for the posts. |
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| Chandler and Stephen by the Hollywood Ballou signs. |
My brain baby was coming up with "rail-weaving." Ballou has a ton of fence/rails so I thought we could weave strips of fabric into them to add more color to the space. It looks beautiful! Emily was able to solicit a few reams of fabric for free from a fabric store.
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| Rail-weaving |
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| Room divider #2 |
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| One of my corps members leading 1st-circle with about 40 volunteers. |
In other news, one of our City Year teams (Leckie ES) was mysteriously not involved with out MLK prep at Ballou. We eventually figured out it was because they were having a service project at their school that
engaged a huge VIP: PRESIDENT OBAMA. So while the rest of us are dying of envy, they got to briefly see potus and flotus. Perks of living in DC. They said they were very genuine even though the event was extremely staged. Cool stuff.
Great day of service! I am so proud of all the projects that were produced with excellence. It was fun and a huge learning experience.
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