Blog Post June 29, 2008

Well, I feel as though I have gotten really behind due to severe technical difficulties on my end—my one and only computer suddenly stroked out and died (hard drive failure in my laptop). Data retrieval was out of the question (mostly due to the out-of-pocket cost), so I am now attempting to rebuild my contact lists, notes, etc. Not much fun. Today, I am making friends with my new desktop computer, which I acquired from a friend who rebuilds such things at a fraction of retail. However, it has little to no software and I am downloading and re-installing many necessary programs.  Also, many officials and persons of interest have been too busy with flood response to be available for discussions and 1×1’s.

However, I have not been idle in my contacts. Here, in no particular order, is a brief summary of the Quad Cities’ progress toward the National Day of Action:

• Tricia Rummer with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources is very excited about the NDOA. She wants to place her Americorps volunteers in prominent locations on that day, including helping to organize the big ServiceFest I hope to create on Davenport’s riverfront. Her Americorps volunteers are required to do at least one off-site community service project, and she thinks that she can get several of them to serve as part of my organizing committee, or at least as interns to help contact and recruit committee members.

• The Quad Cities Earth Week Coalition, ILiveHere.org, and the Scott County Waste Commission are also expressing interest in participation. More follow-up is needed.

• There is a strong contact with AmericorpsAlums that will hopefully yield more hands, minds and bodies to help create ServiceFest.

• I am now the President of Royal Neighbors of America Chapter #20039 in Davenport, Iowa. The seed money the chapter receives must be spent in the ways that the members vote, and there is not much, but the support of the members with or without cash donation will be very helpful.

I have one more week of teaching before I am done for the summer. By then, the flood waters will have all receded, the cleanup will be well underway and community officials will once again be available for meetings. I will also have my computer and all my documents in order by then and hope to move forward quickly.

I am looking forward to getting a list of the organizations that endorse us and the contact persons at the top. This will help a great deal when contacting local organizations.

This week’s goals:

• Contact and make appointment with the person responsible for booking LeClaire Park.

• Finish up list of to-do-things that were derailed by computer crash.

• Make a list of all contacts and share.

• Follow-up on all neglected emails.

• Re-discover usernames, passwords, etc., for a variety of things like blogs, email, etc.

• Re-construct pre-computer-crash notes and info from Atlanta.

I am looking forward to reading others’ blogs as well!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.