June 2024
“We have to embrace obstacles to reach the next stage of joy.”
-Goldie Hawn
Finally…
We have a team that I hope will work together for a very, very long time. It is not easy finding good people on a part-time or volunteer basis. With our limited budget, we always struggle to find talented people who are available and are aligned with our mission and vision. So far, we have been gifted with phenomenal volunteers. They have been wonderful, sharing their time and resources, but it can be limiting since many of them have full-time jobs. Mind you, it’s not because we don’t want to pay; we just don’t have the money to pay people with. This year, fortunately, we were lucky to have some funding set aside for our part-time leaders. So who will be joining us? For the summer, our grant writer is Angelita Vazquez and our community organizer is Liz Wolfert. And of course, our youth program director is Dafne Ruiz. You will hopefully get a chance to meet them once the outreach gets started.
With a team in place, we will focus on building bridges with businesses, organizations, and schools in the city of Aurora. Why just Aurora? By narrowing our outreach to a specific city, we will be better able to use our resources. Before we used to reach out to everyone we knew in Colorado and it has taken away our time and energy from really narrowing on our target audience. This way, we know our community and its needs. Aurora is a diverse city with a large immigrant population, the very audience that our programs were designed for. As we build relationships, I hope to make our program, the go-to workshop for leadership development. And as the City of Aurora begins to grow, they will know our names, our programs, and our organization. We will be the leadership development organization and everyone will come to us rather than develop their own programs which will help them focus on their specialties.
With a team now, where does that leave me? I will be free to develop the facilitator’s training textbook that will be used to train our young facilitators for Activism@Work. I want to make sure that we prepare them well for our participants. It will be the guidebook for our facilitators and others who want to learn how to facilitate. And of course, I will be motherboard for all the moving parts and in time, set a bigger vision in place.
After several months of searching, failed searches, and more searching, we now have a team. Soon, we will have a team of core youth facilitators … and this too will take some time. But hopefully not as much time.
Sam Joo
CEO and Founder
May 31, 2024