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.

The project so far

So far we have had our first meeting with Positive Impact and have planned our second meeting for tomorrow morning. Our first meeting went well save for a few hitches in getting there. Transportation was a bit rough as the streets of Atlanta can be pretty confusing but no one got too stressed out and the people at Positive Impact were very patient with us being slightly late. The first meeting lasted for a few hours as we learned a lot about the organization. We learned about the history of the organization, its goals, guidelines and various programs during our meetings. We also filled out volunteer release forms and met many of the organizations members. After all of this we discussed a bit more in detail what our project would involve. Since then we have written the rough draft of our proposal and are currently finishing up our final draft. We will have that at the meeting tomorrow to get it signed by our contact at Positive Impact. Other than some slight travel and scheduling issues our project has gone smoothly so far and I look forward to more work with the organization as well as my group members. We all seem to work well together and I think that we will handle this project well.

First Personal Reflection

For my Service-Learning project I am working with the group Positive Impact. Through my first meeting with Positive Impact as well as some of my own research I have learned a lot about the goals and aims of the organization. Positive Impact’s mission statement says that Positive impacts mission is to “provide culturual and competent mental health and prevention services to individuals affected by HIV.” This goal is carried out through the work of the organization’s psychologists and counselors who work with HIV/Aids patients to face the huge pressures and demands of their disease. I hadn’t thought about it before, but HIV/Aids patients deal with many mental issues outside of the physical ramifications of their disease-depression and family issues being the first two that come to mind. In addition to their mental counseling aims, Positive Impact also assumes a leadership role in the community to help prevention of HIV/Aids. And as a new program, Positive Impact is launching a substance-abuse counseling program to continue its history of serving the community.

Our group is helping the new substance-abuse counseling program run by Positive Impact to get off the ground. We will be working with Positive Impact to help publicize the program, mostly through print media. So we will be spending most of our volunteer hours designing and creating pamphlets, fliers and brochures that can be used to spread the word of Positive Impact’s substance abuse counseling program and to generate community knowledge and support of the organization. I plan to contribute on all levels of our project, from meeting with Positive Impact and coordinating logistics to designing our print media. I am no expert with computers but I think that I can be of use in that area with a little bit of practice.

I think that this project will be meaningful to me because it will give me a lot of gratification to work with such an incredible organization. I really admire the work that Postive Impact is doing and am very excited to help them. I have a lot of sympathy for both people afflicted by HIV/Aids and those with substance abuse problems. I especially hope for those who approach organizations like Positive Impact and seek solutions to the problems they face. So, it will give me great pleasure to know that I did some small part to positively influence the lives of those who are much less fortunate than myself.

This project intersects well with our course material because HIV/Aids is a sexually transmitted disease and the aim of our course is a focus on Sexuality. STD’s are sometimes considered taboo as are most sexual topics but I think that it is important to talk about them, especially when considering matters of prevention. Only by being comfortable with the topic of Sexuality can we be comfortable talking about HIV prevention, so the aims of our course are very important in making us more comfortable working with Positive Impact.