How do you co-sponsor a refugee family in Greensboro?

I receive a weekly e-newsletter from Church World Service. Below is a meeting call in today’s e-newsletter for an interesting concept, process and way to foster refugees.

I am going to learn more about this sponsorship thing though I don’t intend to participate in it, at least at this point in my life. In my upcoming series on Immigration, I will make note of the various faith-based organizations in the area working with immigrants and refugees.

CO-SPONSORSHIP FOCUS GROUP

WHEN

Tuesday, June 15th at 5:30pm

WHAT

If you have ever been a co-sponsor for a refugee family in Greensboro, please come join us for this focus group. We are in the process of improving the co-sponsorship process and we would like feedback from your experience how to better train, equipment and support our co-sponsor groups working with refugees.

WHERE

Church World Service office

620 S. Elm Street, Suite 315, Greensboro

(At the corner of Elm and Lee Street downtown)

What does blogging feel like to you? Part 5

I hope you find these series topics and posts interesting. I look forward to the routine of writing, especially on the topics below that I find so interesting.

The following are topics I plan on exploring/commenting on in The Perfume Issue next:

Language
I am a language nerd. I love languages and lanaguage learning. I grew up in a bilingual household, accidently learned Spanish and just finished a couple of courses in Mandarin Chinese and Arabic in Greensboro this spring. I've come to the conclusion that "fluency" is a relative term and that, honestly, my English isn't perfect either!

Immigration
Dirty word #1. There's the line with variations that Everyone in America is an immigrant. I have a more recent immigrant history and I deal with how my experience as a second (or first?) generation American relates to immigration as a current hot-hot-hot issue. I always want to lay some thought down to what "immigration reform" means.

Food
Ok, I am fibbing here a bit or at least not being specific. I will actually focus on veganism and my preference toward a vegan diet (hmm and not necessarily a vegan lifestyle...yet). But, I feel like "vegan" is a dirty word, one that can push people away. But at the same time, it is a word that greatly attracts many other people looking for inspiration, support, information and confidence. Well, that's what I am looking for. I'll lay out my reasons for a preference for veganism (which may not be that honorable), my omnivore-licious weaknesses, and...humans.

Oh, humans.

I'm not sure yet if the series will be in the above order but it should all go down the same. ;)

What does blogging feel like to you? Part 4

So, what is successful blogging? Do you have a successful blog? Well, maybe that whole fame-and-fortune thing is what you define as success and maybe it isn’t. Maybe a sudden 15 minutes of fame was a rush and now you’re back to consistently delivering your content. Maybe you want to make this your main source of income. In a [major] way, a successful blog is one that meets or exceeds the goals that YOU put in place for it.

I have gotten a lot of blogging inspiration from various bloggers that have a special place in my Google reader. Some of them specifically offer advice on blogging and some are just people from whom I’ve gleaned inspiration from the way they just do it.

It is often said that there are no real experts or gurus in social media. Social media includes the blogosphere. What I am writing right now is not really from my perspective as a marketing, PR, or social media consulting perspective. Much of what I am saying here is based on my experience as a content consumer—an experience that has been extraordinary recently as I have learned more about the blogosphere and, frankly, what an RSS feed is.

From social media consumer and participant to "manager," it's been a wild ride!

What does blogging feel like to you? Part 3

For me, sometimes blogging feels like homework in the way that kids are supposed to stereotypically feel about homework. You know: blah. Still, it’s homework that I am assigning myself. It’s homework because it seems like/is something in addition to the full-time job I have. I really want to do it and I feel like post ideas run by me left and right—literally!—but I feel like I just don’t have time. The dog hasn’t eaten my homework, it ate my time!

But, this is where the work comes in. Diligence, focus, creativity, consistency, voice, motivation, marketing and management are just some of the factors involved in successful blogging.

What does blogging feel like to you? Part 2

Whether or not you blog for income, there is still respect for consistent and creative--or even just common sense--content. Aside from motivation, there are plenty of resources for helping you establish yourself as a quality blogger. Whatever “quality” means, I guess. In this arena of self-producing and self-publishing, one just may be one’s own boss. Without much physical capital and with time and focus being major investments in your blogging, one may find it easy and even attractive to just…slack a bit.

I figure that your motivation to blog is cultivated by your desired outcomes, including the level of engagement of your readers. Sometimes people may get this backwards: they have enough motivation to start creating content and when fame-and-fortune (to use a euphemism) don’t come their way in the first hours, days, weeks or months, discouragement runs amuck.

What does blogging feel like to you? Part 1

I feel like I've neglected this blog recently. Has Twitter been my excuse?

I think I’ve fallen in love with Twitter this year and it seems to be my social networking platform of choice.

But, wait. Isn’t Twitter a micro-blogging platform? Anyways, I never said the words “social media” until I began managing social networking accounts that weren’t my personal ones; I maintain a difference in my mind between social media and social networking. Twitter as a micro-blogging site is a type of social network but it doesn’t seem to displace anything other than perhaps my blog. Well, in the world of “social,” Twitter doesn’t replace Facebook at all for me, but the engagement I find on Twitter is a lot more, well, engaging than I thought it would be. I use the two platforms to interact and in different ways with different people and groups. The “conversation” and “dialogue” have been of value to me.

My blogging was more of a monologue that I thought I would just put out there and hoped/expected that someone would find it intriguing/funny/witty/relevant.

I’m working on that. Recently, I was better at consistently posting what I hoped were quality and relevant posts but when I became more engaged on Twitter and I learned that Twitter was, well, micro-blogging, I didn’t feel so bad about neglecting my Blogger dashboard once in a while.

I’m planning on getting back into the swing of things, though. I have decided on shorter posts and posting series of content on topics that I am interested in and that I hope to effectively share with people that are also interested in those topics.

I hesitate to say that I should find blogging pleasurable and I don’t know why. I may think that at the moment because that next thing to say is that blogging is one thing for sure:

work.

But, I’m looking forward to it! Check out Friday’s post for the topics I plan on writing about in my upcoming post series.

See Aden Run! Only $10!

Or something like that.

This Saturday I will be joining my team in the Greensboro Children's Museum's Running for the Green 5K. The event will be a fun time supporting the museum's new Edible School Yard that will be debuting right after the Running of the Green this Saturday, May 22nd, at the Greensboro Children's Museum.



The above photo was taken at one of the first volunteer Saturdays at GCM when we started digging the plots. Now that was an experience for me! Ah, nature.

My team doesn't have a name yet...we really didn't think about that! We're three in the team and are pretty excited about Saturday!

Learn more about the Edible School Yard and it's inspiration:
Greensboro Children's Museum
GCM Edible School Yard
GCM Running of the Green 5K
Alice Waters