500 Words about my Internship 
A lot of people ask me why I am at a school that I don’t even go to for the majority of my week. Well, I happen to be a Youth Coach for Alternatives in Action’s Bay Area School of Enterprise, Civic Engagement after school program. I have to give credit to Ginger McBride, who really got me into BASE. She has been a Youth Coach there for two years. Alternatives in Action is a non-profit that works with youth to help them for college, career, and community. It has a few major sites in the Bay Area, and is definitely one of the most legitimate and helpful programs that a youth could be involved with. I started out slow, attending Civic Engagement as just a student in the class. We looked at issues in Alameda, things that we cared about, things that we wanted to change. I found this so interesting because the adult coach, Justin Harrison, actually wanted to change these things. Justin has been an Alamedian his whole life, and actually graduated from ACLC himself in 2001. The class consisted of a few other students and me. It started out pretty slow, but picked up steadily as we had a large event coming up, known as the West Island Youth Candidates Forum. This was a pretty huge event, and I was really excited to participate in it. The first order of business was to make a flier and get the event around. After completion of the flier, we went to door to door and spread the word. After that, we contacted all of the candidates that were running for positions in our city. Basically the event itself is a night where the whole community gathers, the candidates sit at a large table, and the community gets to ask an array of questions. I was actually the Master of Ceremonies for this event. I pretty much walked up with my suit, talked about AIA, Civic Engagement, and the forum itself. It was a strenuous job because the script was rather long and it was pretty scary to be put on display in front of the entire community. This was just one of the events we did in Civic Engagement. We also worked with the Bus Cuts a few months back, and just recently ran The Alameda Art Murmur, which was an event I was extremely proud of. The biggest difficulty in working with Civic Engagement would probably have to be cooperating with other people in the class. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t like people in the class, it was the fact that as a youth coach, I was responsible for finding out where people were, or more often, where they were not. Sometimes, people had specific reasons for not coming to class, or leaving early, such as myself in the later parts for my College Class. My favorite part of my entire internship was the fact that we ran The Alameda Art Murmur. We ran an event that advocates art, and art means a lot to me. Just the fact that I know we put on that successful event makes me smile. Also, I loved the fact I got to spend the entire year, every Monday and Wednesday, from 3-6, with the people I enjoy spending my time with. Also, $250 a month also helps. :D

In Preparation for The Alameda Art Murmur

Day 1:

Running an event like this isn’t easy. It requires splitting responsibility amongst the youth of my class, and making sure everybody performs exactly what they need to in order for the event to be a success. The first day was a very simple yet important one; we had to organize everyone into groups. We organized us evenly into Outreach, Space Design, and Promotion. Outreach controlled contacting all of our partners and calling for art. Space design laid out a foundation for where everything was going to go. Promotion was in charge of fliers, advertisement, and management of the Event page on Facebook.

Day 2:

This day was a step up in the process. It focused on the completion or at least start on the Flier for the event. This was a difficult endeavor considering the fact that everyone in the group wanted the flier differently, even the adult coach. Besides that, this is when we began to contact our partners for the event.

Day 3:

The flier process has become ridiculous at this point. The flier has still failed to be completed due to many drafts and indecision about a final. On the plus, at this point we had most of our main partners on board. The event is coming closer, and tensions seem to be increasing between my classmates.

Day 4

After many scuttles the flier is finally finished. I can’t describe how amazing that final flier looked after so many different copies being made and abandoned. This was where things started to get serious. A few of our partners came in and met with us. The attending numbers on the event page began to increase, and we started to pick our game up.

Day 5

Conflict hits hard. The fliers are printed out, and just when everything seems to be falling into place, we take a hard look at the flier. Typos. Multiple of them. School is spelt with three o’s.  The “I” in civic engagement seemed to be missing. It was a mess. We just printed out 500 copies of a faulty flier. We had to work and work fast. We decided to pass out some of our faulty posters and order a new, fixed addition. At this point, all of our collaborative are on board.

Day 6:

The day before the event. My whole class stayed behind and did hours they wouldn’t normally do to prepare for the event. All the food for our event was generously donated and we were getting ready to roll. We had to do massive amounts in preparation for the event. We had butcher paper up every where and had to move tables all over the place. We had to start to display some of our art, and none of us ended up going home until late that night.

Day 7: The Event

Everyone met at the school hours before the event. This was it. We started by setting up and making at least 70 luminaries and spreading them across the campus. We all worked like mad dogs, setting up art, sweeping, and occasionally goofing off. In the end, it was all worth it because the event was 100% successful with a $130 turn out. Ask anyone, because the Alameda Art Murmur was a success






(Letter from adult coach Justin Harrison to be added)