NOTE: The One Love 5K Run/Walk is September 29th.  There is no registration fee, but if you raise $25 you get a tshirt.  We need to talk about this ASAP.

September- Environment

• Have a "Grow the Tallest Plant Competition." Give each person a seed and we can bring in soil and cups to plant them in. Whoever grows the tallest plant after a month or so gets a prize like extra hours or something. (*MEETING*)

• As our service project, we could set up a community garden.  I know we taked about this in the past and I think it could definitely be done. As for a location would Thoreau allow us to set it up? (Waiting on Nick)

• We could explain and calculate carbon footprints. http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/ has a relatively easy to use carbon footprint calculator. We could calculate 1-3 people's carbon footprints and explain ways to reduce our carbon footprint individually and as a campus.  http://www.mycarbonfootprint.eu/carboncalculator1.cfm?language=en is a site that expains how to reduce one's carbon footprint.

• http://www.bp.com/iframe.do?categoryId=9027936&contentId=7050957 has a 10 question energy quiz.

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November-Homelessness and Hunger, Poverty Reduction

• Budget Activity- Give each student or group of students a monthly budget sheet with a different amount of money that they are allowed to spend. Next, give them a list of items to buy (house, food, car, etc) and force them to spend their monthly budget on these items. We can even break down the categories into subcategories and prices such as nice house, rundown house, apartment, trailer, government housing, and homeless. By making some people have budgets above, at, and below the poverty line and sharing the budgets, the effects of poverty should sink in. (I like this idea. I emailed Buck Buchanan about budget sheets that he may use.)

• The Poverty Level for the 48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia

  Persons in family	Poverty guideline
  1	$10,830
  2	14,570
  3	18,310
  4	22,050
  5	25,790
  6	29,530
  7	33,270
  8	37,010
  For families with more than 8 persons, add $3,740 for each additional person.

• We could couple this with Night without a Home or even do our own "sleep-out." Last year this was in October, but as far as I can find no date has been set for 2009. I think this would be a great project for everyone to undergo as our monthly service component. (Problem with this, I don't think we can "force" them to do this. Remember that we didn't want to spend the night because of classes the next day)
• National Hunger and Homelessness Week is November 15-21. (If we can shoot to go to Bryan on the 16th(Monday) I think it will be a good tie in)
• http://www.nationalhomeless.org/projects/awareness/2009manual.pdf I just found this website and it has a ton of ideas for National Hunger and Homelessness Week and other activities. Let me know what you think about any of those activities. (We may be able to incorporate some of these with what we do with Bryan---or the Path Center, we can talk to both)
• There's a movie called "Have You Seen Clem" about homelessness that has gotten rave indie reviews. It doesn't sound too bad and is only an hour and a half. (I like the review!  Maybe a campus-wide thing?)
• YouTube Video "Homeless in America": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skVtZBaA8ms (In the powerpoint)
• http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Fact%20Sheet%20for%20CollegeStudents.pdf (In the powerpoint)
• The Sanctuary of Williams County--210 South Main Street Bryan, Ohio--419-636-2460. (Do you want to go there with me to talk to them?)
• Maybe we could do a clothing drive to where we go.  Maybe going to the coaches for extra tshirts, hats, etc.
• Powerpoint File

October- Education

• For the community service component, I would say we do something with IEC or even the YMCA's after school tutoring program. If we do education for two months, we could actually do both.
• Activity Idea: Our own version of Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? We could research questions that most fifth graders would know and play it kind of like jeopardy. That would probably take up a whole meeting time and may require quite a bit of planning. 
• http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/doc/electronic/dbeduc.htm may have some resources that we can use to develop questions. The smithsonian website looks especially promising.
• If we wanted to do something thats just fun, we could have a night of board/card games like we used to play back in the elementary school days. I have a lot of board games at my house that we could use. 

April- Education

• Lets focus this month on Autism.  I think that we have enough information to really do something big here.  We could also partner with Hench to do a big project with the students.
• April is National Autism Awareness Month.

January- Youth Development

• Skylark Youth Center
• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99478226 I just saw a neat activity off of NPR called Thirty Things I Believe. Everyone rights down thirty things they believe such as "I believe I can help people." and then we can share some or all of them. We could do that as one of our activities. The website is linked to one that was done by a seven year old, which we could also read as part of the activity. There are a bunch of "This I Believe" essays written as well, some by youth, that we could read.

• Compare the prices of items today with when we were born. We could even make it like a quiz so that whoever is closest gets a prize. Our explanation could be just taking a look at how th eworld has changed from the time we were born until now and how it may change for current youth in the future. 

   

February- Criminal Justice & Violence Prevention

• We discussed doing something with the jail. Also, we could do something with "Take Back the Night" as a service opportunity. I like the idea of organizing a "Cops with Kids Day" as well.

March- Health and Mental Health

• http://www.mental-health-today.com/Healing/learned.htm is something cool I saw. I don't really know where it fits in though.
• Let's do an IQ test. People can choose whether or not to share their scores.
• Show "True Life: I have OCD" or a similar program on a specific mental illness or mental illness in general.