Follow our program! Twitter @CD4AP_FSchool  Facebook.com/cd4apsummeryouthprogram Tumblr/website: cd4apsummeryouthprogram.org

Lincoln Park Elementary becomes summer site for the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools program and I’m the lucky staff member that is behind developing our program’s web presence. First of all, this program is absolutely amazing. If you haven’t had the chance please check out Children’s Defense Fund’s website (http://www.childrensdefense.org/) to learn more about this organization and their Freedom Schools.  Essentially their national curriculum focuses on 5 components: high quality academic enrichment; parent and family involvement; civic engagement and social action; intergenerational leadership development; and nutrition, health and mental health.

My first week I spent an exhaustive amount of effort synthesizing my host site, Community Development for All People (CD4AP), web presence needs for their youth summer program. The second week the All People CDF Freedom Schools was launched and I have been maintaining the website, parent newsletter, stakeholder communication, news release, and social media accounts and will continue throughout my appointment at CD4AP. Three of my five strengths are in the strategy domain, so you can only imagine all of the account set-ups I did with my RockMelt browser (contact me for invites) and Hootsuite account. I do have a tender weak spot for HTML coding, I think my fingers were twitching to start coding the whole time during the primary consultation meetings!

This is the architecture for the website, it took a lot of moving post-its around!

What I’m very excited for this aspect of my position is that I get to start every morning at Harambee, the daily morning kick-off session of Freedom Schools. Harambee is an East African (particularly Kenyan) word meaning “pull together.” It is high energy, fun to watch, and I like to talk with the scholars beforehand during their breakfast meal. I spent every summer since middle school in various leadership roles at summer camp programs and this is my first year not participating in one so this opportunity at CD4AP fills that gap.

My purpose however is not to observe Harambee but rather document and report on our daily morning Read Aloud guest. We have members from all over the Columbus community reading to our scholars, including Columbus City Schools’ Superintendent Gene Harris, Jerry Ravish from 10TV and Robin Davis the Food Editor from the Columbus Dispatch to name a few. It’s really exciting to see community partners coming out from all over the city for these scholars, it’s even more exciting that I get to meet them and tweet of their experience.

Again, gonna plug in my work one more time, make sure to follow our program! Twitter @CD4AP_FSchool  Facebook.com/cd4apsummeryouthprogram Tumblr/website: cd4apsummeryouthprogram.org