Blog Post 1

Tasks:
1) Compose a short summary detailing what work you have completed thus far on your service-learning project (i.e. explain results of your meeting with your coordinator, any problems you’ve encountered, etc.). (200 words)
2) Compose a 500 word personal reflection on:
• What you have learned about your organization
• What your project will entail and how you plan to contribute
• In what ways do you think the project will be meaningful to you
• How do you see the project intersecting with aims and objectives of the course


I have been assigned to work on the Project Open Hand project. This projects deals with feeding the homeless people of Atlanta and raising awareness that this is something that needs to be helped. So far I have not completed much work on this project. This is due to the fact that I had a death in the family and had to be in Michigan during the project orientation and the meeting that followed which attempted to describe what we were going to accomplish.

After the meeting however, my group was able to draft a letter of agreement. In this letter we outlined the time frame in which we believe our project to be accomplished. My group decided that we are going to be making a video documentary of anyone who would be willing to be interviewed when we were handing out food, and making the food at the project head quarters. After creating the video the organization would be able to use it to bring in more funding and more workers. This would not only benefit the organization, but also would increase the number of people that would be able to be helped.


So far I have a very limited view of my organization. I was not able to attend the orientation and have not been able to communicate with my contact person. I will be meeting with the contact later this week and hope to learn about more about my project and about the organization. What I have learned so far from the project description and from their website, is that they are an organization that is centered upon helping other people and doing what they can for the community. My project primarily deals with helping feed homeless people around Atlanta, but from what I can understand, it is a national project.

My project will consist of, I believe, helping to make lunches for the homeless people of Atlanta, and distributing the lunches to the people in need. While making and distributing lunches we will be interviewing anyone who will allow us. I would like to interview not only the people that are making the lunches, but also the homeless people that we are giving the lunches to. From my experience with feeding the homeless, and in turn, talking to them, have found that they have some of the best stories to tell. Not only are they some of the nicest people ever, when you are giving them food, but also, the majority of them are ex-military personal that can tell you incredible stories about their experience at war. I think that if the general population was able to know who all these people were that they would be much more inclined to help these children of war back on their feet. I can contribute to this project with my previous knowledge of the people that we will be feeding and of what type of stories that we will be able to video.

This project will be meaningful to me because it has been a large part of my life ever since I was a young child. My mother was the youth minister at my church and one of the service projects that I she organized was making fifty lunches twice a month to give to the local homeless shelters. I started working on making these lunches since I was about eight years old. When I turned fifteen I was fist able to go out and help to distribute the food to homeless. This was my first experience with extreme poverty. For the next two years I would go and help feed the homeless every two weeks. It was something that I looked forward to and enjoyed doing. This project will allow me to get back into my old habit and hopefully help some of the less fortunate people of Atlanta.

At first I could not think of how this project could interest with the aims of this course. In class we have primarily been talking about sex and the sexual parts of the human body. Sex is not exactly something that has a lot to relate to feeding the homeless. However, after some thought I began to think of the course differently, the course is not designed to just educated college freshman about sex, but it is also made to help the Georgia Tech population get out of its non social ways. This project is about that, getting the study oriented students of Georgia Tech out in the community to get their hands dirty and change the way that they see the world.