Friday, July 27, 2007

No business no gain (3)

On thursday, I went to the golf tournament at highland park country club with the colleagues and some kids. I don't have a younger sister/brother or else like a nephew in Shanghai or Hong Kong, so I had little experience communicating with kids, but this time I spent most of the day with the kids around the field with the golf carts. I had a lot of fun with the kids and they were so energetic.

After the golf game, a silent auction was held along with the dinner. This was the first time I heard of silent auction and I was just there. Dan and other colleagues introduced a lot about the program and everything during the talks with the business men and the speech they delivered. The kids had also given good speeches one by one and Marcus, who was the youngest among them, was a little bit shy, but I think he is a good boy and with cabrini connections he will be a good man in the future.

Last week was really a fulfilled week. I met many nice people from different areas and shared many ideas with them.

What I am working on now is a flash animation simulating the concept of concept of the role of Tutor/Mentor Connection. It is really challenging as I need to find a good way to explain the concept to new comers and this is actually the first time I learn to use Adobe Flash to create animation. I used to ask my friends to handle the flash editing tasks needed to decorate my websites, so this is a good opportunity for me to learn to make flash animations myself. The picture below shows the rough looking of the current progress.



Hope that I can finally make it.

1 comment:

Tutor Mentor Connections said...

Thank you Paul for sharing what you are learning at Cabrini Connections. I hope that some of the people who are reading Paul's articles will introduce themselves via this comment feature. Our goal is to share what we're learning and recruit others, from Chicago, Hong Kong, and the world, to work with us to make more and better programs like Cabrini Connections available to more youth in more places where such programs are needed.

The concepts Paul is trying to illustrate show how a volunteer entering service in a tutor/mentor program learns from his/her experience, and shares what they learn with friends and family. That's what Paul is doing with this blog.

The more time a volunteer spends in service, the more he understands about poverty, and how a tutor/mentor program can expand the adult network surrounding a youth. As he shares this on a consistent basis, that leads his friends and coworkers to also become volunteers.

As they learn about tutoring/mentoring from their own experiences, this creates a group, who begin to work together in their industry, college or faith group, to unleash the resources of many people, to help the program where they volunteer, or to help programs in many locations.

As this happens, the T/MC supports the involvement of volunteers at different programs, and provides information the volunteers can use to encourage other people to get involved.

As Paul illustrates this concept, my hope is that others will understand it better, and this will increase the number of people who get involved.