Last week I attended my second board meeting and was lucky enough to get to meet our founder Gerda Klein. She is a woman of extreme sincerity and strength and I was honored that she expressed gratitude for the work that I have been doing and will be doing this semester.
The board meeting itself was fascinating. We began by discussing the most recent National Conference on Citizenship, which is held in Washington DC every year on September 17th, in honor of the ratification of our Constitution. Our Executive Director, Alysa Ullman, went to the conference and held numerous meetings and panels with organizations from across the country that try and promote civic action and awareness of the values and responsibilities of citizenship. Alysa also held meetings with Immigration Services and some other government agencies to discuss new communities that we might begin to reach out to in order to develop new programs. Some of the recommendations include Minnesota, Florida, California, and Nebraska, and so we have begun to develop contacts in these areas to begin to develop programs nationwide.
We also discussed the schools here in Arizona that we will be running programs in in the next semester. We are attempting to reach out to both charter and private schools as we have seen success in public schools already. We are also attempting to run the program as connected to after-school or extra-curricular activities. This way, students can hold the program as part of an honors society, or as a club activity for those clubs that are engaged in civic action and political awareness. We would also like to run a program in southern and northern Arizona, especially since we have some good contacts in the Tucson area.
The meeting ended by dividing up responsibilities among staff and board members for contacting these new schools about our program, and I am excited to see how many schools are interested.
No comments:
Post a Comment