Day 2 of Blogging

My titles will get more exciting, as will my blogs. I promise. I'm just new at this and have a hard time starting out with what to write about. Since I am at work, I will start with just that.

A Day in the Life of Work:
Today, I started out at a meeting with community partners from all over our county. We talked about concerns in our community, particularly those affecting the quality of life of youth and families. We discussed the lack of health care, housing, transportation, prevention programs and funding. I brought up the fact that we are the only shelter program for youth in all of our county with only seven beds. If our program is full, we are forced to send the youth to the neighboring county, outdoors, or back into the dangerous situation they are trying to escape. When you have a youth in this situation, chances are they haven't seen a doctor in years, if ever. There are most likely some mental health issues occurring that the youth does not recognize, and therefore does not seek help for which may hinder the youth from successfully becoming independent, which is what our program works to do. After talking about the barriers we as providers are facing, we did our best to focus on the positive things happening in this community. For instance, we have a lot of caring people in this community with the mission to help our homeless youth and families. This meeting generally generates anywhere from 20 to 35 people who care and really are passionate about making this a safe, healthy and productive community. Next, we were informed about a wonderful job program for low income youth this summer and to encourage our youth to apply for this work experience. After this meeting, I journeyed over to our main office to participate in our staff meeting. We debriefed and filled each other in on all the clients. Further, we reviewed the outline that I created of new policies for our program. We have been talking about reconstructing the program rules to better serve the clients. I am excited to see what the new program expectations will do for the house and our clients. After the staff meeting, I headed back to my office to wait for my 3:00pm appointment who no-showed. Unfortunately, it is something that I am used to. But, I guess if I didn't know where I was going to be sleeping or what my next meal would be, I might be missing appointments too. It's rough out there for the homeless and I feel for them. At the same time, it's very important for me to see people follow through in order to work with them. So, I got to spend the afternoon relaxing. This evening, I have been chatting with client's about their day as they come through the door. I will help one with job searching, one with updating her resume and later tonight, a client will be leading the first life skills class on nutrition. I am looking forward to see how it goes and how her peers will react to the information she will present. That's Positive Youth Development right there. Hope it goes well!

Signing off for now...