The Volunteers Are Here!

Our first groups of volunteers arrived yesterday afternoon!  One group is from Wisconsin and the other is from Illinois.  I will be having a lot more groups from up north this year because of my location.  They try to schedule groups so they drive shorter distances.  In Tennessee, I got a lot more of the southern groups, but since my county this summer is almost as north west as ASP goes that is not the case this year.

Things have been going well in our county as a whole.  We were able to find all 7 homes for our crews to work on this week, although it was a challenge.  And we will need to find 5 or 6 more for week two since we jump to 12 crews, and at least one of our current projects may be completed after this week.  Since ASP is new in the county we are still working on spreading the word and trying to gain more applications.  So as Center Director, I spent a fair amount of time set-up week trying to build up relationships with existing community contacts and make new ones.  Community contacts are usually non-profits in the communities where we work that already work with low-income families and are able to collect applications for us, even throughout the off-months when we don't have a presence in the county.  In order to generate more applications, we even went so far as leaving applications in the mailboxes of home that we thought could be potential projects.  One of the new contacts I was able to make is the Long Term Recovery Team (from the tornado) in Morgan County.  Up until this point, we had not really received many applications from tornado damaged homes (and still haven't received many... but are hopeful!).  The most we had seen was hail damage from the storm surrounding the tornado.   The Recovery Team invited us to attend one of their weekly meetings, so Logan and I sat in on the meeting last Thursday.  They seem to still be in the developing stages and are ironing out some wrinkles in their system, but it was very interesting to hear an insider's perspective on the recovery process in the county.

Our weekly culture night tomorrow night will be some speakers who experienced the tornado first-hand, so I'll post more about that next time!