Remember September

Well, we just finished the orientation presentations here at Cabrini Connections. We put together two different PowerPoint presentations, one for the Volunteers and one for the Students that outlined the roles and responsibilities of both parties in the program. During the presentation we made informal introductions to the students and volunteers. We discussed the various programs offered at Cabrini Connections and provided information about Tutor/Mentor Connection, our knowledgebase of all things related to tutoring and mentoring.
In between the creating the power point slides and doing the actual orientation I worked on some of the projects that needed attention. We have a program called SVHATS (Student & Volunteer History And Tracking System) which we use for tracking the students day to day activities here at Cabrini Connections. It had some broken links and outdated email addresses that needed correcting. I also attempted to work on our Cmap program, to no avail. One of the pages has several broken links on it. I wasn’t able to fix it so, I did what every good techie does in times of trouble; I reached out to tech support.

During our presentations, I was afforded the opportunity to reflect on a story I read in the paper one year. It was about a young girl in 8th grade that had lost her 4 brothers and 2 sisters to street violence. When asked to write about her plans for the future, she wrote a paper that described her funeral arrangements. It was a very telling story of how youth, living in poverty see their future as hopeless. It is stories like this and others I’ve come across that have led me to this undertaking. I believe we can make a difference, if we but try.

We have some very interesting events coming up in the next few weeks. There’s a fundraiser coming up on October 19, 2007 called the Martini Madness, the other event is a Tutor Training Conference September 29, 2007, we’re looking forward to big turnouts at each event. This would be a great time for anyone interested in learning what we do or anyone interested in finding ways to help to get more information.