adventures of a midwesterner: MLK Day 2010

Hi! The past month has been pretty busy, mostly due to the big event I helped plan on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The 8 people on my COD day have been working on this project since October and it really all started coming together the last few weeks before MLK Day (Jan. 18th). As I've mentioned earlier, the focus of the project was hunger relief, since that was the need most evident in the community from the different human services organizations we talked to. It took awhile to iron out all the logistics for MLK Day but it turned out really well! The day of service started at noon, and we had a couple of projects going on for volunteers. One project was construction, and involved building raised garden beds and portable wooden collection containers for food pantries. The other main volunteer project was running food drives at 11 different grocery stores all over the Cape. After service ended at 4pm, volunteers and other community members were invited to a soup dinner at a church in Dennis (mid-cape). Overall I'd say the event went really well, as we collected over 4,000 food items and gathered $900 in cash donations.
The food & money went to the Cape Cod Hunger Network, which disseminated the resources to food pantries Cape-wide. Early on in the project I was a little worried about getting enough volunteers, but a week before the event we had over 150 volunteers who wanted to participate! We actually had to turn people down because we had only planned for 100 or so. It's helpful that AmeriCorps has planned community service events on MLK day for the past nine years, so there is a pretty large volunteer database to turn to.
The only downside of the day was that only about 50 people came to the soup dinner. The volunteer chefs we had made food for 250 people, so there were lots of leftovers! Luckily we were able to donate much of it to local nonprofits, and take home some soup for ourselves as well. It's nice to have my COD day's big event over with, and now COD day will be less stressful. It was fun planning the project, though, and very rewarding to see it come together and be successful.

Group service has been pretty low-key this month, with quite a few Wet Fests. We have had a few outdoor service projects, like the one last friday with the Harwich Conservation Trust. We worked at a few conservation properties, cutting invasive Bittersweet and Green Briar. I've done a few saturday service projects this month, including a Red Cross fair for Boy and Girl Scouts where we taught them simple concepts like what to do in an emergency or how to do CPR. Another weekend project was going to Taylor Bray Farm (a nonprofit and service partner with AmeriCorps) and engaging in the glamorous job of scooping up animal poop. Although it wasn't the most exciting way to get service hours, we did get free eggs out of it! Not too many new things have been going on with my IP these days, as I'm still working on planning the Book & Media Swap, as well as working on GPS-ing trails at conservation properties. I enjoy the days when it's warm enough to go outside.

There have been a few warm-ish weekend this month, so I've been able to explore some areas around Wellfleet/Truro/P-town that I've never been to. One is a Beech forest at the national seashore in P-town and I've also gone on some hikes with my housemates to explore more of the forest around our house. It's also nice on the rare days when I get home early enough to catch a sunset over the beach. :) The weekends have been relaxing and quiet and I've been working on my bread-making skills. The beginning of February will mark the halfway point in the program (!) and it's kind of hard to believe it's been that long already. I am definitely feeling pressure to start thinking about next year, which I don't really want to do but obviously need to devote time to.

Hope everyone's 2010 is off to a good start! Adios for now.
Love,
Margaret