Friday, September 24, 2010

Jessica here!!

Hey guys!
I'm so excited to be a part of this project with the summit program.  So far it has been a great experience! ... Not to mention so nice having our own apartments :) ... but besides that we have all been talking with our partners at lighthouse and have been getting some great ideas for these next few months.  I am really excited to get to start working with the kids and getting to know them.

As the others have probably talked about, we not only plan on helping them at the daycare, but also planning some really fun events for these kids and their families.  They all seem so sweet and really deserve to have something fun to do with their parents.  The people at lighthouse seem really nice and appreciative of all we plan on achieving this year.

The girls and I have been doing great together, we have had several movie nights and stuff where, I have to say, we make the best pizza ever! haha. It's been a lot of fun and it makes life so much easier to get up early in the morning for practice if everyone else in your apartment has to as well.  So far, no one has overslept... haha.  I can say from experience that I am very thankful they are here to wake me up!  As for everything else, we have been respectful to each other and have had a lot of fun.

Andrew: I loved that we got to sit down for coffee with you! We all had a lot of fun and it was nice to get to know you and tell you more of what we plan to do in the next year!!!! Thanks so much for giving us this opportunity.

Ok... bye for now!!

-Jessica

Thursday, September 23, 2010

The beginning of the Summit experience!!


Hey guys!! 
My name is Tiffany and as you can tell I am a member of the Beacon Project. Things have been going really well so far in our apartment! Summit is amazing. It is definitely a privilege to live here, and I hope that after all our projects this year we will have done enough to have deserved the honor. Living with other girls from the swim team also makes life so enjoyable. I think that together we are going to get some awesome things accomplished this year.
I originally started thinking about living in Summit last year, after I had visited a friend from the swim team’s apartment here. I know it sounds bad but the original reason for my motivation was maybe not the best. I saw how nice the apartments were and decided that all the extra time and effort would be worth it. I talked to Molly, Jessica, and Deanna and we decided we would try to get in. Once  we started thinking about everything more seriously, my cause for motivation to live in Summit changed. I began to see how rewarding it would be to actually volunteer my time towards a good cause. I have always looked at other people volunteering and respected them and everything they do, but I somehow always found an excuse about why I was too busy. I would volunteer for the odd thing here and there, but always found that I wished I could do something more. I realized that living in Summit could give me this opportunity.
Looking at the year ahead of me, I am excited for all of the possibilities that we are going to have. My group and I started to work with some ideas at the beginning of the year, and so far everything is falling into place really nicely. We have been meeting with our community advisor specifically on two main projects this semester. 
Our first project is going to be a fall festival on October 23rd. We are hoping to use one of the gyms on the Drury Campus which will allow all of Lighthouse’s 50 or so families to attend and enjoy the festival. We are hoping to provide food, crafts, and some fun booths for the kids. Our goal is to give these families time to visit with one another, building a support group for themselves in the community. We set the plans in action today with a meeting with Lighthouse to organize the details of the Fall Festival. There is still a lot to be done, but it is looking great so far!
Our next project is going to be to organize an event where the Lighthouse family members can attend the Christmas concert performed by the Springfield Symphony. The plans are still in the works for this, but I am really excited because it looks like it is going to turn out really well. 
Because I am an elementary education major I am hoping to learn a lot from this experience. I feel as though volunteering with the kids, and getting to interact with the families will teach me skills that I couldn’t learn sitting in a classroom at Drury. Through The Beacon Project I hope to gain knowledge that will help me in my field one day to be a more effective teacher.
-Tiffany

Deanna Signing In...The Second Time

Hey!

So I must have messed up my first post because it apparently, as everyone can see, didn't show up. I'm sure Molly has informed you greatly of what we have been up to recently in her post, bu I wanted to share a little bit from my side of Summit.

Things have been going really great! No roomie fights and our apartment looks wonderful! We would only expect the best for working so hard to live here, and it is the best! The girls had a meeting with one of the members of our Lighthouse program today to discuss everything about our fall festival that we are going to put on. We are going to try to see if we can even do it here on Drury's campus! Hopefully the kids and their parents will really enjoy seeing how beautiful it is here and how wonderful college life could be for them one day!

In other exciting news, we are hopefully going to get started with our volunteering soon! We have had some difficulties with getting in contact with them since Erica Harris retired but we have finally reached Deanna ( yeah! her name is my name!) and things are going really great.

Last night was so much fun, we had coffee with Wiemer at the Mudhouse. We talked and laughed for a little over an hour and got to know him better in the process. Not to mention had some delicious coffee's and smoothies! So for all of you who haven't done it yet, get on it! It's awesome!

Well, I think that's about it for now. Gotta get started on other Summit related activies (homework...). See you all in class tomorrow! Have a great rest of the day!

Deanna Sorenson

Summit in September


Hello everyone!  This is Molly.  Things have been going really well during this first month in Summit Park!  For starters, I love our apartment, and I love living with my roommates.  Our apartment feels so homey, and it is wonderful to live somewhere other than the dorms.  We are getting things ironed out with the Lighthouse, so hopefully we will get to start volunteering sometime next week. 
                Besides the obvious reasons of free laundry and a dishwasher, the main reason I wanted to live in Summit Park was for the volunteer opportunity.  I always did a lot of volunteer work and community service in high school, so I was disappointed in myself that I did not volunteer more in my freshman year at Drury.  Summit seemed like a really good opportunity to ensure that I devoted some of my time to community service.  Also, I wanted to get involved in the Springfield community.  On a college campus, I feel like it is very easy to get caught up in the “college life,” and forget that another world exists outside of Drury.  Last year, I tried to get involved on the Drury campus, but I think I did a poor job of getting involved in the area. 
Through this leadership experience, one of the things I hope to do is to learn more about the Springfield area and simply become more involved in it.  Just through researching for our Summit presentation last semester, I learned a lot more about Springfield and the opportunities it offers for its residents.  Additionally, I am still undecided about what I want to major in at Drury, but I am leaning toward something in the field of education.  By volunteering at the Lighthouse Child and Family Development Center and experiencing constant contact with children, I hope I will be able to decide if an education major is right for me.  Since we are planning on coordinating a couple of events for the children and families at Lighthouse, I would like to gain better organizing and planning skills throughout the year. 
Today, we met with the director and family outreach coordinator at Lighthouse to discuss our Fall Festival we are planning to hold at Drury on October 23.  We came up with a lot of great ideas for games and activities that will encourage the parents to come together and establish social networks with fellow parents at Lighthouse.  It will be a lot of work to plan this event in a month, but we are all very excited to get started!  We will keep you posted on the organization of the Fall Festival!

-Molly
                

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Hello!!!!

Hello Fellow Summiteers!!!!

Just testing out the blog. We hope everyone else is doing wonderfully on their projects. We just wanted to see how this good stuff works. We had our first advisor meeting tonight which made us so excited about everything that we have planned! Hence, the start to our blog and an awesome year working with Lighthouse and Summit. "Yeah, hence!"

Peace and Blessin's, Peace and Blessin's,
The Beacon