So Letsgetglobal.org is up and functioning. I still haven’t done a major announcement yet. Next week.
Next week I’m also planning to spend a day at the Library of Congress searching for foundations who offer planning grants. I will begin with query letters. I need a coordinator…and someone who will work the social networks. (I don’t know how people have time to have a life and keep up with the Tweet/Facebook/blog world.)
I love all the people who have helped me out along the way, most really nice caring young people……….but volunteer work is not number one in their lives. School, jobs, internships, family all come first. I need to have someone on salary! I would like LGG to be the job that they have to show up at every day. And for that, I need to have funding.
I’m about to send out a lengthy listserv letter…probably tomorrow. If you’re not on my list, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you an invitation to join.(femalenomad@ritagoldengelman.com) It will be mostly about LGG and what we’ve been doing and what we need. If you want to volunteer, send me a note.
At the moment, I’m looking for around five schools across the country who want to be in our pilot program, high schools that you know would cooperate with letting kids know that there’s an option to going straight into college. Once we have the schools, we will put together volunteer teams to work with the faculty, the students, and the parents. If you have a school-candidate…and if you would like to be on the team, let me know. We’re working on a volunteer kit.
Have to run to the supermarket to get the ingredients for the Vietnamese PHO I’m making for tomorrow’s guests.
See ya. Rita
i absoulutly want to help. this has been a thought of mine for some time. so great to see you doing something bigger with it. i would love to go to my local high school to see if i can encourage particpation. let me know what kind of help you need and where you are planning on going with this currently. i live in Corvallis oregon. any other folks you know of in this area? thanx and i look frwd to how i might assist your program. lani
Lani (and any one else out there), How about stopping in the high school and asking them (principal and guidance counselor) if they would consider presenting to kids the option of seniors applying to colleges, getting accepted, and then asking for a deferral so they can do an international gap year. (High schools won’t even consider encouraging a gap year if it means the kids won’t be applying. Schools and counselors are rated on how many of their kids get accepted.) By September I’m hoping to have between five and ten pilot schools who would let our volunteers present the idea through counselors, language teachers, parent organizations… We will be working on a volunteer kit soon and we’d like to set up an after-school Let’s Get Global club so students who think they might be interested can work on the idea. We won’t be promoting any one program (the schools should know that we aren’t a business!)…..just encouraging and assisting kids to explore the idea….and giving them advice about how they can fund it. Just today I discovered that AFS has 17 scholarships to send people around the world to be teacher-assistants in English classes.