Week 7
This week has been packed full of learning opportunities to apply concepts learned from class into real life. I continued to work on a potential presentation to a younger audience regarding health, thinking, and personal identity that I will elaborate on in the Concepts Learned section. After coming up a rough draft of the presentation I decided to call Port Townsend High School’s Athletic Director and Vice Principal to discuss the possibility of me coming into a classroom and sharing this outline. He seemed receptive to the idea and mentioned that if I wanted to I could come and show the presentation to a few faculty members to see who would be interested. This week I discussed methods of record keeping for non-profit organizations and how selectively gathering information can provide incredible dividends. This discussion was separate from other discussions I have had with Gail about my supplementary grant writing class because it was through the lens
of Fertile Ground. The organization has records of individual community members sending them letters of appreciation to represent how Fertile Ground satisfied their need along with a historical record of all organizations within the community that have originated from, expanded from, or have just relied on Fertile Ground. On Saturday I attended a Fertile Ground potluck to discuss the details of the farming season with people potentially interested.
Concepts Learned
In this process, I articulated the correlation between low moral centralities and the likelihood of changing ethics to match behavior. During the presentation I gave to the class regarding physiology and mental health, I intentionally separated behavior from the other processes because it is a reflection of the health of the other processes. When I wrote out a way to articulate the individual-to-group engagement processes I realized the potential of utilizing the separation of behavior from an individual’s action towards a task in my explanation. After illustrating information regarding both concepts along with their visual cues, I intend on suggesting meditation as a technique to satisfy the need to act on this information without facing the identity crisis of trying to drastically alter a routine and sustain that alteration because wisdom is only as accessible as the emotional capacity of the user to digest the information gained from the wisdom. I realized meditation fits because it removes you from your conscious state for a small period of time to train your brain’s ability to focus while training your nervous system to relax. In my spare time I explored different types of meditation to confidently suggest the method in which you sit and breathe without giving a thought a second thought, turning your brain into an ongoing dialogue with yourself.
In this week’s texts, I learned about the Ze
bulon M. Pike expedition of 1806-7 and how it lead to the U.S. colonization of northern Mexico. I also learned that some well-off Mexican families who were in favor of Spanish colonization of Mexico ended up moving to New Mexico, creating a strong Anglo affinity within the ruling class with arriving entrepreneurial American traders. I also learned more about the effect of popular artists at the time augmented the belief that life should be glorious and heroic.
I learned the history behind Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier song this week. This invaluable piece of knowledge came forth in Dunbar-Ortiz’s quote on page 142, “In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations – the buffalo.” The systematic destruction of the symbolic buffalo still affects the state of our plains’ ecosystems to this day. The act of total war on a group by another marginalized group shows up throughout history in rather unpleasant situations. I learned about one of the most globally destructive pieces of legislation passed in US history, the Monroe Doctrine. This vague piece of law states that any nation engaged in any activity that threatens perceived US economic or political interests will be disciplined militarily by the United States. I also discovered te
xt that illustrates the direct connection with industrialization and frequent intervention on the side of big business in domestic conflicts between a corporation and their workers. The case example provided especially caught my attention: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the first nationwide work stoppage.
In August 1917, white, black, Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms with a larger goal of overthrowing the government to establish a socialist commonwealth. A hundred years later, history is hoping to repeat itself with the emphasis on railroad distribution of tar sands for the Dakota Access Pipeline.
This week has been extraordinarily busy due to the drastic increase in workload for my other program about writing grants. I cannot list the hours spent working on grants for this program, but I would like to discuss concepts learned from that experience. A grant is comprised of several components in effort to illustrate how the chosen methodology solves the need as reflected in the objectives. This interconnectivity between these three components of the grant more-or-less outline the rest of the argument. I had to ask Gail and Karen specific questions regarding any documentation of history at Fertile Grounds to demonstrate how Fertile Ground has historically met a need for individual community members and organizations within the community. Understanding the grant writing process helped me understand how and why they chose the method to collect the information that they did.
Internship
This week was interesting because I was able to count some of my discussion hours with Gail about grant writing with program material from this class. I have learned the approach to writing a grant from my other program, and with a freshly detailed account of the process, I can ask Gail for specific information that she may or may not have and in that process I have learned invaluable steps to document progress in order to receive grants. This includes photographing events, documenting noticeable changes to the environment, tactically asking for documentation of ideas that are hard to convey unless expressed intentionally (such as personal emotional growth which can be the need based portion of a grant), and documenting a history of organizations interacting with your non-profit. I was also able to participate in the Fertile Grounds potluck and I got to listen to honest concerns from people who are not used to engaging in these sort of events.