Monthly Blog - August

The month of August has been a brief period of time where I have taken baby steps in learning about my senior topic. So far I've obtained three articles, one book, and already looked up two other books on the internet. During this month alone, I've done 13.5 hours of mentorship. Ten were performed at Pomona Valley Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and 3.5 were performed at the Pomona Fairplex. There was one good management lesson that I had learned at the Fairplex: taking initiative if you have a great idea of your own.

Three other volunteers, a staff member, and I were getting very few people coming to our informational booth. About an hour has passed and I just started to get annoyed of standing around and not doing anything due to the fact no one came or had any questions. Ultimately, I told two other volunteers we were going to run out of our booth into the Fairplex to advertise our booth and try to receive donations while informing the public about what our organization was about. We had a stud (a large, wooden 2x4 that is placed in homes), and we took it out there and had people sign it for a dollar. All-in-all, we picked up about fourteen dollars in donations and a bigger crowd started to come over to our booth, curious on what we were doing.

It was a good feeling to bring people in like that. I was bored out of my mind to be honest, but I really was skeptical about the entire idea at first. It goes to show that even when you are bored and out of your mind good ideas can flourish. A wise man once shared this nugget of wisdom, "insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results everytime." If your plan doesn't work at first, try something fresh and new!