I interviewed Gary Jahnke because he was a teacher I had in freshman year who I came back to TA for last year. Mr. Jahkne was an excellent teacher and I really admired him; since freshman year, I’ve grown to respect him more. I come back frequently to do some work for him so it wasn’t that difficult to interview him. He surprised me by telling me that he would like to change how America is viewed in the world, and his reasoning is that he grew up watching the Vietnam war on the TV. As a history student, I know that the media wasn’t as controlled in the seventies which allowed for graphic images to show up and incidents like the Tet offensive show and spread. I never really thought about it and how Mr. Jahnke would have seen and been affected by that. However, I learned a lot. I learned more about him and I learned more about how a young person should handle their money. I also learned important life lessons, like to always respect someone and think about how they act and why before getting angry about it.

Our team decided on an organization fairly easily. Early in the project, Abby suggested the Best Buddies program at the school and we agreed upon it then and there. The amounts to allocate is whatever we manage to raise. My experience working in the group has been a positive, easy one. We are usually in agreement with each other so there’s no problems. I expect the coming week to be fun and fulfilling; it’ll be exciting to give our money we’ve raised to the Best Buddies program.

It was surprisingly difficult to create a purpose, vision, and mission statement. We ended up coming up with really simple ones to easily define what we were doing and why. I expect that reaching out to organizations will be difficult for me personally because I don’t like to talk to strangers that much, but overall fairly easy because these organizations are always looking for a chance to speak to others about their cause and getting more support and funding.

I learned a lot from the paper bag activity. Each person has a story, and each item they brought told only a small part of that story. For example, both Kaitlynn and Abby brought something to represent cheerleading and how important it was. Abby also brought a picture of her family because they’re her backbone, and Kaitlynn brought a hair tie to represent how her hair is used to define her. Our fundraiser will [was] a bake sale and sitting in front of Winn-Dixie and asking for donations.

I really like the panels and listening to each representative speak about their organization. I learned that each person truly did love where they were working, and it was just really great listening to them speak about it with so much passion. It was really inspiring. Listening to them, I learned a few statistics that really helped to narrow down the organizations, but also how each place worked and how their employees felt about it. There wasn’t a single organization that I wasn’t impressed by. My team’s fundraising activity is going slowly. So far, I don’t think we’ve raised anything, and it’s going to be difficult to do so because exam season is coming up and AP classes are holding reviews on the days that we would normally be fundraising on. Here’s to hoping that we can all meet up soon for some fundraising!

There are two ways that you can evaluate an organization: using their numbers and by how they interact with everyone, like employees, volunteers, and patrons. Generally, seeing how people act or treat others is the best judgement of character. That’s how you see how they actually view others. Numbers can be changed somewhere along the line, but how someone treats another person generally can’t. How the organization treats those it helps is the best way to see how they truly feel on what they’re doing.

So far, I would say I find it easy to evaluate organizations. Truthfully, I haven’t called an organization so I don’t really have the problem of speaking to someone on the phone. My group has been looking to donate to a specific organization from the start of the program so we aren’t torn between companies and don’t really need to evaluate others in order to decide on who to donate to.

The organization my group is mostly looking at to donate to is the Best Buddies program here at the school. Looking at the 990 form, I learned that they have a fairly low expense for their management and fundraising costs. Which, honestly, wasn’t that surprising.

Looking at numbers before investing is important because without doing so you could end up giving to or investing in an organization that doesn’t use the money they get the way you intended for it to be used (like using it to pay their CEO or for advertising). I also apparently answered the second part of this in the first paragraph of this post so there’s that…

When we were handed the MAD cards, I didn’t think it would be a difficult choice at all to pick six organizations or topics that I wanted to help with. However, it was. There were so many options that I could choose from, so choosing six was a difficult struggle. Imagine my surprise and displeasure to find out we had to lower those six to three! And to think I thought choosing six organizations was difficult. In the end, I chose the three that most hit home to me: animal care, people with physical and mental disabilities, and environmental protection. I wasn’t at all surprised to find that many others had chosen animal care and physical and mental disabilities as one of the organizations they were interested in, but I was surprised to find that no one else (that I can remember, this was quite a few days ago) chose environmental protection. It’s such a shock to me (and it probably shouldn’t be, but I can’t help it) that no one else ever really thinks about our current impact on the environment and all the horrible things that is happening to the earth, the only planet we have to live on currently (who knows, we could find another planet like ours somewhere, someday). Anyway, what I hope to gain from participating in this program is a new way to look at the world; now I know how many things need help, and maybe I’ll learn how to help them through this program to make a positive impact on this world. Who knows, this program could help me leave a footprint on this earth for many years to come.