Blog 5

Working with Positive Impact over the fall semester has given me a lot of satisfaction. I feel like during our volunteer efforts I learned a lot and worked with some very interesting and inspring people. I am very proud to have been able to help in the community and feel privileged to learn from such people. I don’t know that I can necessarily pin down one thing that I am most proud of in our work with Positive Impact, save to say that I am incredibly proud to have done something to help the community, and done it in a way that I would never have thought of before this semester. Were it not for taking this English class I don’t think I would have ever considered volunteering to help with a group focusing on HIV/Aids. But now, having been forced to, I am proud to have worked within this organization. Perhaps the other thing I am most proud of is working with the people involved in Positive Impact. Marc Lambert, John Williams and Nicole Scott, our three main contacts at Positive Impact, are all truly incredible people. Rarely have I met people as happy, focused and inspiring as them. I am incredibly proud just to have been able to spend some of my time around people like that. I am even prouder to think that I may have been able to help them, even if it is some small way. From my point of view, it looks to me like many of the workers at Positive Impact dedicate the majority of their lives to their work. At times we were there in the evening and many of them were still at their desks, eating dinner while getting their work done. I don’t know that I can consider myself as good a person as these people, but I’m proud to have worked with them.
I don’t know if I will do any more work with Positive Impact. As we all know, being a college student and dealing with other responsibilities is pretty time consuming, so volunteering wasn’t something I had in mind when I first came to Georgia Tech. However, at this point, I have to say that I would definitely consider doing more work for Positive Impact in the future. As far as other volunteering opportunities, I don’t have any in mind, but I am open to doing more volunteer work in the future. In fact, after my extremely gratifying experience working with Positive Impact, I would say I am more open to doing volunteer work than I was before this experience.
Working with Positive Impact helped me to understand a side affect of HIV/Aids I hadn’t thought about before. In this way, it tied in greatly to our course. Our English class had a focus on sexuality, and HIV/Aids was an important subject during this course. By working with Positive Impact I have become more aware of problems that face HIV/Aids victims. These people have to deal with tough mental and emotional issues branching from their medical concerns. They often become depressed or have trouble with their family. Often, they can’t keep their jobs. Positive Impact helped me understand that there is more than a medical side to Aids. This project also allowed me to work on my communication skills, and working them into different forms. More specifically, our group spent our time working on pamphlets, brochures, handouts and other print material. This gave us a much better idea of how important the design, as well as the content, is in a project of this sort. I learned more about using images and presentation in communication, and how to use various programs to create these various documents. I feel like what I learned with Positive Impact will be very useful in the future. For one thing, working for such an organization is a strong resume booster. I also will be able to apply my new knowledge of Word, Publisher and Photoshop. Lastly, I know a lot more about what it takes to start up a program and to publicize it. This could become very valuable either when doing other volunteer work or in my career.

Blog 4 part 2

The speaker from Planned Parenthood gave an extensive lecture on sex education and the prevention of disease and pregnancy. Her talk intersected with many of the same topics looked at in the documentary “The Education of Shelby Knox.” In this documentary, Shelby is a teen girl from Lubbock, Texas who has been exposed only to “abstinence-only” sex education. When she looks around at her school and sees how high the pregnancy rate is, she realized that there must be something lacking in the abstinence-only approach to teaching adolescents about sex and sexual behavior. She begins to become active in the community and to push for comprehensive sex education in schools. Our speaker from Planned Parenthood covered many of the issues that Shelby pushed for in the Lubbock School system. During these abstinence only sex ed classes, students were taught that the only way to practice safe sex is to abstain from sexual behavior until marriage. Although Knox was committed to her own personal vow to abstain, she believed that this educational program was not acknowledging the realities of life for some teens. She knew that some teens were having sex, and believed that someone needed to offer comprehensive sex education to not only teach teens about the dangers of sexual behavior, but also to teach them ways other than abstinence to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease. Our Planned Parenthood speaker touched on many of the same issues that Shelby was interested in. She talked about the various types of sex, and the risks involved in all of them. It is important for teens to realize that sexual behaviors other than vaginal intercourse do exist. In some cases, these behaviors may be safer than intercourse, but there are still dangers associated with them all. These behaviors include oral sex, anal sex and “outer-course.” It is also important, our speaker told us, to behave in a sexually responsible manner. This means treating your partner with love, trust and respect. It also means talking to your partner about their feelings about particular behaviors, and acknowledging ways in which you can make sexual behaviors safer. From there, she went into the mechanics of safe sex-for example, she introduced a variety of birth control options, from pills to patches to forms of surgery that can prevent pregnancy. She also showed both male and female condoms, which in addition to helping prevent pregnancy also stop the spread of disease. She talked about proper condom use and addressed how to stop rips or breaks in condoms that undermine their purpose and put the user and their partner at risk for pregnancy and STDs. She also told us easy and cheap ways that we can access the various forms of birth control. This type of comprehensive sex education is exactly what Shelby Knox fights for in “The Education of Shelby Knox.” She argues that students in her school district will be better prepared to protect themselves and their partner if they have adequate knowledge of prevention. In this way, our Planned Parenthood lecture intersected with much of the content in “The Education of Shelby Knox.”

Blog 4 Part 1

There was a great deal of interesting information covered in the Planned Parenthood lecture last Wednesday. I was very interested to hear the speaker’s opinions on some of what you might call the “holistic” side of sex education. For example, she spoke about trust and respect for your partner, and being attentive to each other’s pleasure. She also told us she considered all humans sexual beings, and that it is important to be in touch with our own sexual identity. This means more than simply having sex or who we sleep with. It also has to do with our gender, gender identity, orientation and our values and how they pertain to sexual behavior. Her “three steps to safer sex” were three points I found very interesting. These were: become honest with ourselves about our risk, decide which risks we are willing to take, and find ways to make our sex play as safe and satisfying as possible. I like this simple and intelligent way to approach safe sex. These were the points of our Planned Parenthood lecture that I found the most interesting.

Aids Walk-part 2

Our work at the AIDS Walk intersects in a couple of ways with our project. First of all, we were able to help our organization, Positive Impact, represent itself as a benefiting organization at the AIDS Walk. Positive Impact had a booth among the other Benefitting Organizations at the AIDS Walk because it is important for the organization to represent itself at an even that is so important in the HIV/Aids community. By helping the Positive Impact organization on such an important day we were able to contribute to the goals of our project. Also, in a more broad scope, we were able to contribute to our course aims of learning about sexuality. It was good for us to witness the incredible community support and empowerment that the AIDS Walk promotes in generating money for helping stop the AIDS epidemic.
What I enjoyed most about our experience at the AIDS Walk today was being a part of the incredible feeling of energy and positivity that surrounded the entire event. The event occurred in the Beautiful Piedmont Park in the middle of Atlanta and was packed with thousands of people. There was a stage with music and speakers throughout the event and booths representing both event sponsors and AIDS support organizations (like Positive Impact, the group we are working with). Everyone there was there to raise support and awareness for HIV/Aids and they all seemed to be incredibly happy to be there on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. Without a doubt, my favorite part of the experience was simply being around such strong emotion and hopefulness surrounding an event that I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.
What surprised me most about this event was the size of it. Perhaps I am betraying my ignorance of this incredible happening by saying this, but I expected it to be much smaller and grassroots. The Aids Walk is actually, as I learned today, a huge event in Atlanta with thousands of people present to show their support by running, walking or just being present at the event. I was astonished when we walked through Piedmont Park and first saw the sea of people attending the event. I was also presently surprised to see the diversity of the population present. Every gender, race and age seemed well represented among the crowds of people present to show their support in the fight against HIV/Aids. The presence of live music and speakers contributed to the feeling of professionalism along with the number of sponsors and supporting organizations present. But to top all of that, the walk itself actually closed parts of busy streets in downtown Atlanta! That must take a lot of influence and pull to do in the middle of such a crowded city. It speaks well of the history, size and organization of the event. I admit to being very impressed and surprised by what a massive undertaking it must be.

Aids Walk-Part 1

Today our Service Learning group attended the Atlanta Aids Walk to help our organization, Positive Impact. After finding our way to Piedmont Park we fought through the crowds of people to find the booth area that Positive Impact had among all the other benefitting organizations. When we arrived the Positive Impact members were running behind on setting up the booth. We were quickly drafted into helping the last parts of setting up the booth. We spread out tablecloths and set up posters. From there on we sat in the booth as people circulated through and picked up fliers. We also handed out bottles of water to people preparing to head out on the Aids walk. Before many of the Positive Impact members left to go on the walk, we took several pictures with the whole of the present organization and volunteers. Then most of the people involved in the organization set off on the walk while we stayed behind to man the booth. Once the walk had started and the area had started to empty we began taking down parts of the booth to make it easier for Positive Impact to break down and go home after the walk. We took down the posters and tablecloths and have them to give back when we return on Tuesday.

Blog post 2-part 2

I have done some community service in the past, and in some ways volunteering with Positive Impact has a lot in common with those experiences. For one thing, I have the same sense of satisfaction in volunteering to help a non-profit organization and the community. Even though the project is one that I’ve been forced by school to undergo as a class requirement, I still am proud to be involved with Positive Impact. Another similarity to other volunteer organizations I have worked with is the people-they are all incredibly interesting, determined and positive people. The people I have met at Positive Impact all energize and inspire me, just like most other people I have worked with that are heavily involved in community service.
My experience so far with Positive Impact has also differed greatly in many ways from my previous volunteering experiences. The largest difference is the amount of freedom our group has in our work. Positive Impact has provided us with the background information we need, and made us feel fairly at home with the organization. They have also provided us a direction in which to direct our energies. Despite this, we are given a broad set of goals and left free to our own devices during a large part of our volunteer hours. The members of Positive Impact we are working with seem very confident in our abilities and so far have allowed us to direct ourselves during our week. At this point in the project we seem to be meeting or exceeding all of our goals so I see this trend continuing. Perhaps we will be given even more free reign as we continue working with the organization. I would have to say that the goals of the organization differ a lot with this organization than the others I have worked with when I was younger. HIV/Aids is a sensitive subject in our society and one that young people aren’t often exposed to. During my other experiences with community service I worked with much less touchy issues.
I believe I am learning some valuable lessons by taking a more professional role in volunteering with Positive Impact. For one thing, the project is helping to reemphasize the importance of punctuality, hard work, and using time valuably. I am also soaking in the incredible effort that it is to run an organization like Positive Impact. For such a small organization it requires an incredible amount of work. I’ve learned more about what exactly people like social workers, counselors and psychologists do and how they help others. I’ve also learned about the importance of privacy for those served by Positive Impact. I hope that as we work with Positive Impact I can continue to learn more about the organization and what’s required of a non-profit service organization.

Blog post 2-part 1

Since my last blog post, we have worked extensively towards our goals with Positive Impact. We have been back to their offices on two occasions. On our first visit, we met with John Williams, who is in charge of the substance abuse counseling program that we are working with. He talked with us about what his goals for us were. He was very interested in what our capabilities were and made it clear that he trusts us and is giving our group a lot of freedom to do what we think will help most. We also met a number of other Positive Impact employees and volunteers whom we will be working with for the next couple months. We also talked about what we would all like to get personally out of the project. I think we all agreed that we would like to learn about the organization and to get a good understanding of the organization rather than do our project and move on.
On our second meeting, we had several print documents on hand to show Positive Impact that we had designed to use as the cover of booklets and pamphlets. From their we worked on several other tasks the organization had for us, such as shrinking documents into a size appropriate for use in pamphlet or booklet form. Our project continues to go well and I am confident we are achieving our aims.