So I just realized I didn;t post a my EL comment post with the others…So I’ll post one now.

I decided to comment on porkchopsmom’s EL blog on the Ronald McDonald Foundation. I thought it was great that this foundation was brought up. I have always new about the RMHC Foundation but I never paid that much attention to it. The only thing I knew about it was that it dealt with kids and that I would drop my change into the slot when I paid with cash at McDonalds, I do the same thing when I go to Chipotle and their tip bowl. But I never knew that RMHC had so many programs or scholarships. I just never gave it that much thought but I guess McDonalds can do something good despite all of the negative press it recieves. Also there are ways for people to volunteer and support the foundation outside of dropping change while your buying your BigMac.

Since I wasn’t able to make to class last week, I decided to skim through some of the other readings randomly. I decided to write about China and Egypt’s funding. In the NGOs as Civil Society Actors on Media Policy Change in Egypt I read that the majority of their funding they depended on was from foreign funding. I thought that was interesting because in the same article it mentioned that NGOs had to go through the gov’t in order to apply to recieve foreign funding and that the gov’t is very restrictive and linking up with the foreign corps/orgs may have a negative effect on their image.  I found this linking to China a bit due to 80% of China’s funding comes from foreign  funding.

So the nonprofit I came across that blogs is GreenPeace.  GreenPeace as everyone knows, is a environmental organization whose goal is to promote peace and be activists for the environment. I am wishy-washy when it comes to GreenPeace, on some levels I comend them for their efforts and goals. But on the other hand they sometimes remiond me of Peta, in the way that people may view them as a terrorist group. But I have included their blog website for you to check out and also on the right of the page they links to some of their members/staffs’ affiliated blogs.

http://weblog.greenpeace.org/makingwaves/index.html

Today was a very busy day.

After interviewing my old boss and heading back to Mason. I went into DC for my first DC Stop Modern Day Slavery group meeting. I found it to be extremely interesting, there were a lot of new people and people of various ages. But what I thought was very interesting was the fact that they had a speaker come and talk about SHared International’s Demand documentary.  Shared International is a nonprofit that focuses on rescuing women and children in crisis. I’ve seen the short version of it but never the full length version of it (though we only watched half of it). But this documentary spoke about the main reason behind the human trafficking is due to the huge demand for it. It goes on to point out different examples about how a lot of things we let slide and the fact of the increase of porn industry and how all of that is linked. For example, it mentioned the term “pimp”. Here in America, it is seen as good and as bad at the same time. No one really wants to think about prostitutes being forced into prostitution, just that she has no morals or is on drugs, blahblah. But we see it as wrong, but then we have tv shows called Pimp My Ride or Snoop’s depiction of a pimp/him hanging out with Bishop Don Juan. The fact that there are scenes in our video games like Grand Theft Auto with the street walkers, it kind of makes us numb to certain things after a while. I’m not saying that is the reason behind human trafficking. I think people take advantage of situations and are always looking for easy ways to make money.  One thing from the night that summed up what I feel is the true basis behind human trafficking was that people just don’t think about it. They think of it as being a one time thing or that eventhough it is illegal or shady, our society kind of turns it’s head in the other directions sometimes.

Shared International also came to our GMU a few weeks ago, I don’t know if anyone caught their showing but I had to work that day…

Here is a link where you can watch the Demand documentary there are 3 versions (brief, condensed, full):

http://www.sharedhope.org/what/enddemand3.asp

and the pdf that goes along with it:

http://www.sharedhope.org/files/DEMAND.pdf

So today, I visited my old internship, NATSO (National Association of Truck Stop Operators) Foundation to interview my boss for my EL paper. In this interview Sharon, the executive director of NATSO Foundation, brought up a good point. She pointed out that everyone is effected by the trucking industry. Almost everything, we purchase is transported on a truck, even if it was made in China. There has to be a way for the products to get to your home or to the retailer. So that really got me thinking. During my time at my internship, I could not understand why truck stops would need an association. But now that it was put in that viewpoint, I understand. With the changing of gas prices and the up and downs of the economies, it affects so many factors in our lives. For example, this previous year the increasion of gas prices had a major influence on the increasion of prices in our products, especially groceries.

So here is a little bit of background information on the NATSO Foundation:

NATSO Foundation is a subsidiary of NATSO, Inc, a trade corporation. They were created in 1989, it was formed to disberse the scholarships. The foundation is funded by their endowment (the interest made off of stocks they had invested in order to gather money for the foundation), their annual fundraiser, and their major gift fund (donations from sponsors). The NATSO Foundation’s mission is to use their geographic advantage to take care of everyone who travels along the interstate system. They help connect the truck stops with their community.

I found my interview with Sharon to be very enlightening since I never really asked her direct questions about the purpose of NATSO having a foundation, so that cleared some things up for me.

So before Amy’s talk, I never really gave Zimbabawe a thought. Sure, I skimmed over the article that was sent out before her talk but that is as far as I had thought. Zimbabawe was just another country in Africa, I have a tendency to focus on my own life more so. But I had no idea about their political system. i had  heard about their one million dollar bills but that’s pretty much it. I found her talk to be very interesting when she spoke about how their President had been in power for so long and when the previous elections took place, he had to cheat in order to keep his position. And the people that were found out to be involved with the election against him were hunted and basically prosecuted in some way for trying to actually use their right to vote. It just makes me think of how lucky I am to live in a country that people are actually able express themselves to a degree.

So for my random post I decided to write about my week. So this week, while working on my organizational paper I’ve been getting distracted by so many different little things. So today, I spent a lot of time researching jobs and careers. I’ve been researching various positions in nonprofits, gov’t, and corp (gotta keep my options open).  While getting distracted I stumbled across idealist.org’s Grad School Blog. I found this to be an interesting find. Basically, Idealist.org has this Public Service and Graduate Education Resource Center (PSGERC) which gives a lot of information on grad schools and other options for students who are interested in the nonprofit field.

But they have released their new program called the grad blog which allows the students to blog about their experiences relating to careers and education. I thought that was an interesting idea that I could relate to slightly due tpm the fact that they are also using wordpress. Overall I just thought it was interesting and maybe able to help someone in the future.

Here’s the link: http://www.idealist.org/en/psgerc/blog.html

So I wanted to comment on emilyadiutori’s comment on mkalaly’s post about Coffeekids.org. I thought this whole subject was fascinating. The fact that coffee is still hand sorted and that people are getting $.04/lb. That seems so outragouis to me, especially with so many coffee shops we have here in America and the amount they charge for one cup of coffee. This doesn’t even include the cost of purchasing coffee in the store. So I found both of these blogs to be very interesting and eye opening. I never really gave a thought about the process my food goes through and the costs behind it. I have always only thought about the end result and the price on my end.

I’m surprise that more people haven’t blogged about WordPress. Since we have to do this blogs so many times a week, WordPress definately effects our lives. I see it as being a hassle and also with other things going on in my life it is hard to write when there are different days that to blog and I just become so confused. But anyways…enough of my ramblings.

WordPress.com was created by the same people who created wordpress.org. WordPress.org is just like Mozilla, in the sense that it is an opensource organization. Their codes and products are free. Actually, I am not sure whether they are officially a 501c organization but from what I gathered is that they were or are trying to become one. But it is interesting to see these open source projects/orgs popping up. I never gave open sources a second thought. I knew they were out there but I thought it only had to do openoffice.org. Little did I know that there were actually more projects and orgs that only produced these types of programs that allowed people outside of their companies to gain access to their codes and help make improvements on them.

So I decided to try and get more active in my community and network a bit with people who have interests dealing with human trafficking, especially since I will be looking for a job soon.

I joined the DC Stop Modern Day Slavery group. It is a community group that deals with the fight to end human trafficking. I am not quite sure if this is considered an official nonprofit but this community but they have fundraisers and also link up with various human trafficking NGOs.  On their website it states their mission is “to end slavery forever by leveraging the power of the community.” The way this group plans to implement this is by fostering grassroots movements, being involved with existing programs and events hosted by other NGOs, government, corps, and various individuals/groups, and also by creating a ground for education, engagement, and action.

But this group was started by the Co-Executive Director of the Polaris Project who later turned the group over to the “community”. So it isn’t as much affiliated with the Polaris Project as it used to be. For those who don’t know about the Polaris Project (almost everyone). The Polaris Project is a non-profit organization based in DC. They run the official National Hotline for Human Trafficking. Human Trafficking is termed the “Modern Day Slavery”. It is when a person is forced into labor work or is sexually exploited. A lot of times people are trafficked into other states, countries, etc. But the Polaris Project is a very small organization but they have a huge impact on the research and dealings with human trafficking.

I’m excited to be going to the next meeting on Thursday, it will be my first time going to anything like this. I have never been really involved in anything dealing with the community on this level. Sure I have volunteered here and there but not on a continuous basis. The only time I had to do something without pay was when I was a receptionist in high school at the Stephen Decatur House Museum. I worked their for volunteer hours but I didn’t consider it being actually beneficial or true volunteering.

www.polarisproject.org

http://www.stopmodernslavery.org/