On Being An Expert Citizen

This past Thursday, we had Dr. Don Stenta (stenta.1@osu.edu) speak to the trip leaders. In addition to developing leadership courses and a minor in leadership for the University, Dr. Stenta also has an appointment within the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. He talked with us (not at us, which is always nice) about the "link between leadership in service."

His main message was that just doing service is contributing to the status quo. Those who volunteer, especially college students, hae to do more work to understand and changed the social problems of our country. This involves understanding politics and how policy is made; I think this is something that college students avoid doing because we already have so much on our plate. We can barely handle o-chem, so on top of that, many of us don't want to put the effort into understand the complicated framework behind government policy. However, as Dr. Stenta emphasized, this is what's essential to truly helping: we have the resources out there to solve problems, but do we have the priorities? The question he posed was "Why is it okay to pay a football coach 3 million dollars? How many homes would that build? How many meals would that serve?" Dr. Stenta points to the fact that we lack the knowledge about how the system works to explain why our priorities are so out of whack.

We watched this youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwVVu54z5ys) about the American Civil Literacy test, and then took a civic engagement quiz, to begin to understand out own connection to American policy and political activism (which has a radical connotation, but can be as simple as wearing a button to support a certain candidate). All the trip leaders also recieved a list of ideas to increase civil and electorial activity, which is what we're going to focus on after the trip. What conversations/actions can occur AFTER the trip that make this more than just a one-shot service opportunity?

20 days until we leave for Camp Heartland!

Two week update

For the past two weeks, there hasn't been a lot of planning concerning the trip going on. The make-up of the trip participants has changed slightly, just because people's plans have changed, but the new participants seem to be a lot of fun. Two weeks ago, our training focused on getting to know our co-leader better by playing a version of the Newlywed Game. Kristen and I were SO close to winning!

This past week, we had representatives from the Multicultural Center (http://mcc.osu.edu) come and speak to us about the different identities that all of us have, whether it be race, gender, socioeconomic level, sexual orientation, or anything else. Understanding our own identities helps us to become better leaders, and also will help to realize that every person on our trip - participants or the people we work with at Camp Heartland - have their own set of personal identities that define who they are. It was a really great chance to get to learn a lot about our co-leader, in addition to learning a lot about some leaders from the other trips. It's cool how the trip trainings have created a community between the leaders for all of the trips.

Outside of trainings, all of the leaders for all of the trips have had to write to op-ed pieces in the form of letters to the editor; one concerning the issue that our trip is addressing, and one on an issue of our choosing. I wrote mine on how poverty changes the way that HIV/AIDS affects people and another on how public schools don't deserve much of the criticism that is leveled against them. These op-eds will be used in next week's training, which is on being an "expert citizen."