Check Granting Ceremony

The meeting with the various presenters went very well. I learned how to deal with the various personalities professionally. I work with professionals everyday but this was a little bit different. There was a mix of staff and volunteers. A lot of the volunteers were either late or at point seemed to not care. It was pretty amazing to see how Imani was able to get their attention and keep such a warm and welcoming personality.

I asked her after our meeting about this. She told me that it was pretty much the same as how I usually interact with people just that in a non-profit, you might have to extend you hand a little bit more. People like to be praised more about their work since volunteers don't get paid. She advised me to make sure everyone is comfortable and that they are appreciated. Without them, a lot of the great things that SF Pride does for the community would not happen.

I used the tools that she showed me during the meeting when it was my turn to deal with the volunteers who were there to help with the event. There were a lot of faces I knew already but a ton more that I didn't. It was nice to interact with them. As the night went on, it felt like I had built a team. We worked hard and after the ceremony was over, we went for drinks. It's so refreshing to see so many people so happy after volunteering.

Back in the Office - SF Pride Central

This week I am back at the main office. I have heard news that the office will be moving in two weeks. The new location will be right across the street. We will have this week to finish the check granting ceremony tasks before the event takes place on the 24th. Then I will not be needed until the office is moved.

We worked on a few more edits before the script was printed. We had some letters that also needed to be printed and signed by staff members. These letters were an official congratualtions and thank you to those beneficiaries. I learned how to do a mail merge. This task basically saves much time putting information in a letterhead without having to type everything per letter. I basically created an excel sheet which then was accessed by word to create certain fields. What a great trick to know.

Next week we have the event. I will need to arrive a little bit early to go over the script with the presenters. We have a dry run planned at 3:00pm with showtime at 6:00pm. Let's hope everything goes well.

Writing a Script - A Collaboration

This week I worked from home. I setup a call with Imani and worked through some of the previous weeks tasks we talked about. With the check granting ceremony coming up, we needed to work on creating the script for the various presenters.

Imani had a skeleton script which was used from the previous year. After having her create a gmail account, I had her upload the skeleton script into google docs. From this point on, we worked together editing the script while talking on the phone. We could have done this completely without the phone, but I thought our conference call was necessary as we were speaking lines back and fouth, seeing what sounded better.

As we worked down the script, Imani was very pleased with the tool. I had her export the file to a Word doc so that it could be saved. We will be continuing to work on this document but I will be back at the office next week. We have this one week to have it finished.

09/03/09 - Meetings After Pride

The 2009 San Francisco Pride celebration happened in June although the community activities for the celebration are still quite active. After meeting with Brendan Behan the Deputy Director of San Francisco Pride I had learned that there would be a pretty big turn over with staffing in the coming months. He suggested that this would be a great opportunity for me to be doing research there as new people would be coming in for training anyway.

We talked about some of the upcoming projects tat I could possibly learn from and give some suggestions on how to improve them. The check granting ceremony was going to happen which I have been involved in with one of the new Event Coordinators Imani.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting with Imani discussing what the Check Granting Ceremony was and what role I would play. She gave me a breakdown of what was planned and how she planned on reaching out to volunteers for the event. We also went through a rough agenda. We took notes on what kinds of documents needed to be created and how they traditionally distributed them. We looked at every position and how they were to be filled. My role for this event will be to be Imani's assistant and make sure everything was running if she ever needed to attend to anything else.

After our discussion, I had suggested that she might use Google Docs to help with collaboration instead of sending e-mail and or having multiple Word Docs. She had not heard of Google Docs before. I took her through a quick tutorial of the application. Shw was still pretty weary of the tool but we are planning to try and use it for this event next week for the script that we will be collaborating on for the emcees. Next week I will not be going to the LGBT Center but instead will be collaborating online using Google Docs and talking on the phone. Let's see what happens.