Where Do I Begin?

I hardly know where to start. For those of you who don't know, well now you know. I have been living in Philly for the last 3 weeks and this will continue for the next 10 months, at least. What am I doing? Glad you asked!

To put it simply, I am working with City Year, a program that is part of Americorps. City Year is a really simple concept but often seems hard to describe because we do so much with so little. Our site is known as the Greater Philadelphia site, and has the largest corps with around 185 corps members. Each member is assigned a team of any where between 6-12 other members. For example my team has about 12 but we are divided into 2 teams, which will be working with 2 different high schools. I will be working in Simon Gratz High School and the other members of my team will be working at Strawberry Mansion High School. What will we be doing?

Lots of things. We may be working with youth in their classes as a teacher's assistant, tutoring small groups or one-on-one, helping with after school programs, and other people in the corps will be focused on getting youth to help volunteer their time to clean up their communities and make a difference.

There is so much that we will be doing its hard to know where to begin. For the last 2 weeks we have been doing our basic training. Sounds almost like boot camp, huh? It's kinda funny 'cause they make us do PT, which stands for Physical Training. It makes me laugh a bit, but I understand that it helps unify the corps, and sometimes when we are feeling kinda slow it gets the blood flowing. So even that silly part of training has a purpose.

It's been really fun to meet all sorts of really interesting people. There are about 2 men to every women so let it be know that either City Year is most definitely not discriminating or women want to make more of a difference then men? I don’t know the answer to this question but its nice to see people, especially women who are taking the steps to become leaders. Many of our members are from Philly but many of us are from all over the US.

Last week we spent a few days at a Camp outside of Philly. It was nice to enjoy a few days in nature. We got to know our permanent teams and got to know everyone much better. We had a talent show, which was great to hear lots of people sing and perform. I have lots of picture but am still learning how my camera and this blog work, so please be patient.

I think that is about it for now. I am enjoying exploring Philly and will update it soon. Till then hope everyone is doing and let me know what you think, and leave me feedback. Also my email and phone number are the same so I want to hear from you all. Till next time, be safe