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.