What Nourishes Us? FINAL REFLECTION

What Nourishes Us?

Over the course of this year we have had several investigations to explore this essential question.  To begin the year, you visited farmers markets to explore where food comes from.  We examined what nourishes our  food systems and what nourishes us physically.  In the middle of the year we examined what nourishes us emotionally.  We studied Melinda in Speak, visited MOMA, and created original art pieces to examine what it means to express oneself.  Finally, we examined what nourishes our communities by researching and examining social issues that affect our local community.

Directions:  Create a blog post that examines WHAT NOURISHES US?  Describe how your experience with YPI has helped to nourish the community and ourselves.

1.  What nourishes our communities?  Describe the social issue you researched and explain how your community based organization nourishes the local community.  Use evidence from your visit (stories, interview answers, personal experiences as well as the mission, services, and volunteers from the organization) to support your answer.  Discuss (8pts)

2.  What nourishes us as individuals?  How did your experience working on YPI explain what nourishes us as individuals?  Use your personal experiences of giving, volunteering, understanding your social issue, interacting with clients from your organization, or working with your team to support your answer. How did your experience of raising awareness for your social issue and organization make you feel? Discuss (8pts)

(Note:  Please answer each question completely for full credit (2 grades)

AoW18: Persuasive Presentations

Directions:  Watch the following persuasive presentations.  What is the most effective part of each presentation?  What persuasive devices are at use?  Ethos (building credibility), Pathos (emotional appeal) , Logos (using reason/logic).

THINK ABOUT:  What works?  What techniques might you borrow for your own presentation?


PRESENTATIONS


YPI EXEMPLAR_Winning Presentation from Anthony Voulgarides on Vimeo.


PREZI EXAMPLE
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW

http://prezi.com/dbslnabv28dz/youth-philanthropy-initiative/

http://prezi.com/qhbgyhxzth7e/youth-philanthropy-initiative-four-square/



Youth Philanthropy Initiative_Exemplar 2 from Anthony Voulgarides on Vimeo.






SMALLER VIDEO PSAs (WITHIN PRESENTATIONS)
What is the purpose of each video?  What techniques could you borrow for your own videos within your presentations?

WHEELS Up! from Anthony Voulgarides on Vimeo.







Untitled from Anthony Voulgarides on Vimeo.




Untitled from Anthony Voulgarides on Vimeo.

Untitled from Anthony Voulgarides on Vimeo.

In this 12-minute speech, she engages the audience and develops a mutual connection with them right from the start with stories of her family, her modest upbringing, hardships experienced and overcome by her parents and herself, and how she met her husband. It is these stories that add the most colour to her talk, and that I believe provide the greatest bond with the audience.

This is a very inspirational speech that does not waver from its goal. Every story and example gets the point across of how “regular” people all have the power to do remarkable things if they get educated, help each other, pursue their passions, and use their talents to help their communities grow. If I was in her audience, I would feel like she’s speaking directly to me.

What would a presentation skills coach say?

The speech content is inspirational and well-structured. Very tight, direct, and persuasive. Calls-to-action at the conclusion, coupled with a smile, a strong voice and eye contact send off the audience with drive and motivation. The only thing I would add to the content would be a little more detail on her first date with her husband. My guess is that she didn’t want stories that were not relevant to the overall theme of her speech to overshadow the points she wanted to make. But it certainly would have been interesting!

So it all comes down to her delivery.

Directions:  Watch the following persuasive presentations.  What is the most effective part of each presentation?  What persuasive devices are at use?  Ethos (building credibility), Pathos (emotional appeal) , Logos (using reason/logic).

In your comment:
1.  Identify a technique within a video that you find to be persuasive (tell the video and describe the part)
2.  Analyze:  What makes it persuasive?  Building credibility and connecting with the audience?  Emotional appeal?  Logical appeal / reason?

AoW17: Community Organizing

AoW 17:Community Organizing Never Looked So Good

By Sara Rimer

Published: April 10, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

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George Ruhe for The New York Times

Rylan Truman is following a career path that has been lightly traveled: Community Organizer.

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Sally Ryan for The New York Times

Quinn Rallins, whose father grew up in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing development in Chicago where Barack Obama was a community organizer. Mr. Rallins wants to do similar work in Brockton, Mass.

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Obama for America, via European Pressphoto Agency

Barack Obama went from law school to lead a voter registration drive in Chicago.

Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

Marshall Ganz leads a Harvard workshop.

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J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Drea Chicas wants to be a community organizer after she graduates college.

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Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

Patrick Hidalgo is taking Marshall Ganz's community organizing class at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

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Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

Josh Daneshforooz founded All Nations Education, which organizes students in the United States to help young people in the third world go to college.

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J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Margot Seigle, a graduating senior at Occidental College, works with children on math literacy in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles.

QUINN RALLINS, 23, graduated magna cum laude last year from Morehouse College with a dual major in international studies and Spanish. This spring, Mr. Rallins is finishing his master’s degree in comparative social policy at Oxford. He has analyzed research for the Rand Corporation in England, led workshops in Malaysia for Amnesty International and founded an organization to help orphans in the Dominican Republic.

His next step? Top financial and technology companies and nonprofit groups have expressed interest in hiring him. Even in this economy, he has options.

But Mr. Rallins wants to be a community organizer — just like the world’s most famous one, Barack Obama.

Mr. Rallins says he hopes to win a job with PICO, a national faith-based organization. He is applying for a position in Brockton, Mass., an industrial city battered by the state’s highest foreclosure rate, the loss of most of its major manufacturing jobs and dwindling state resources. Starting annual salary is about $35,000.

“My mentor at Morehouse says that at the end of the day, it’s not about how much money you make, it’s about the lives you’ve impacted and the stories you have,” Mr. Rallins said.

He is not alone.

A job that has not been all that alluring to college graduates is in resurgence, according to leading community organizers and educators. Once thought of as a destination for lefty radicals committed to living lives of low pay, frustration and bitter burnout, community organizing is now seen by many young people an exciting career.

With their jobs, students envision helping communities address urgent issues — economics or the environment, education or social justice — while developing leadership skills. And these jobs, students say, can actually lead to ... well, you know.

“Community organizing has become cool,” said Marshall Ganz, who dropped out of Harvard in 1964 to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi and spent 16 years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Of course, a tough economy helps attract people to professions they might not have otherwise considered, as does a crusading time when Wall Street has become a symbol of greed, arrogance and irresponsibility.

But the turnabout in popularity is still quite remarkable. Last fall, 200 people, the overwhelming majority of them in their 20s, applied for a single community organizing job at a PICO affiliate in San Diego County, said Stephanie Gut, a PICO director. The salary would be about $35,000 to $40,000, plus health benefits.

In the past, there might have been 25 to 30 applicants for a job that involves developing grass-roots leaders in church congregations to work on a variety of social issues, Ms. Gut said. Although a sagging economy may have had something to do with the number, it couldn’t account for all the interest.

Two years ago, 250 applied for 26 paid summer community organizing internships at the Center for Community Change in Washington. Last summer, there were 1,200 applicants for 65 paid internships and fellowships.

Colleges are also seeing more interest in courses along those lines. Peter Dreier, a politics professor at Occidental College, says he usually has 20 to 25 students in his community organizing class. So far, 42 students have registered for next fall.

“I haven’t become any more popular as a professor,” said Mr. Dreier, who directs the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental. “So the increased enrollment must have something to do with the political climate, student interest in organizing and the impact of Obama.”

Certainly, there is an Obama effect. Through his presidential campaign and in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama managed to glamorize and, more important, explain community organizing. He wrote about meeting with people in their homes and churches, listening to their stories, the failures and small victories.

“Before, you’d talk to young people about community organizing and they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about,” said Susan Chinn, a longtime community organizer who started the internship program at the Center for Community Change.

“Community-based organizations have not done a very good job of marketing this work to a broad swath of people across the country.”

But they now have had a presidential campaign full of free advertising, and they want to capitalize. “We tell them, ‘Obviously there’s a lot you can do with it,’ ” said Robert Fisher, who teaches community organizing at the graduate school of social work at the University of Connecticut, Hartford. “And now we have the punch line: ‘Now you can be president.’ ”

Mr. Rallins of Morehouse College grew up on Chicago’s South Side, where his father came of age in the Altgeld Gardens, the same housing project where Mr. Obama once worked as an organizer. And Mr. Rallins, who wrote about his ambition to persevere, achieve, serve and see the world in his essay, “The Audacity of Hunger,” seems well aware of the parallel and the potential.

Mr. Obama “said it was the best education he ever had,” Mr. Rallins said. “Young people, they’re looking for certain intangible skills. They see the experience Obama got from community organizing — his concern, the way he relates with everyday people.”

Mr. Rallins said he became committed to the job while working with other Morehouse students in New Orleans in the demolished Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina.

“That’s where my heart is right now,” Mr. Rallins said.

Rylan Truman, 27, will graduate this spring with a master’s degree in social work, with a concentration in community organizing, from the school of social work in Hartford. “I would like to be able to organize parents in low-income jobs around their children’s schools,” she said.

But she doesn’t have a job.

“My graduating now is poor timing because of the economic situation,” she said. “A lot of community organizing jobs are the first to get cut.”

Even if these young adults became paid organizers, there is no guarantee that they will stick with it. They, like Mr. Obama, might eventually become frustrated about the lack of progress. After all, Mr. Obama himself left with few victories in his pocket, deciding that prospects for real change lay elsewhere.

Post: TAKE A STAND à BE PERSUASIVE!

1. Respond to the questions on the bottom of each AoW or post an original response.  Use text evidence to support your response.
2. Reply (comment) to a teammate's response  Summarize the argument made then add your own thoughts and evidence.  Finally, post a question to keep the conversation going.  Use text evidence to support your response.

Answer any of the following questions:

• Would you be willing be a community organizer?  Why or why not? What social issue is most important to you?  Why?

• What is the most important factor in getting a job?  Money?  Helping others?  Explain and support your response.

• What social issues affect Washington Heights?  Support your response with facts and statistics.

April 22, 2013

AoW#16:  City Plan Sets 21 as Legal Age to Buy Tobacco

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

The age to legally buy cigarettes in New York City would rise to 21 from 18 under a proposal that officials unveiled on Monday, a measure that would give New York the strictest limits of any major American city.

The proposal would make the age for buying cigarettes and other tobacco products the same as for purchasing liquor, but it would not prohibit people under 21 from possessing or even smoking cigarettes.

It is the latest effort in a persistent campaign to curb smoking that began soon after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office, with bans on smoking in restaurants and bars that expanded more recently to parks, beaches, plazas and other public places.

But this latest proposal, announced by Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, and Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a mayoral candidate, puts New York squarely into the middle of a debate over the rights and responsibilities of young people, and it drew much skepticism. At 18, New Yorkers are old enough to fight in wars, to drive and to vote, but if the smoking restriction passed they would be prohibited from deciding whether to take the risk of smoking.

Ms. Quinn and Dr. Farley defended the proposal, saying that people typically make the transition from experimental smoking to regular smoking around age 20, and that by making cigarettes harder to obtain at a young age the city would make it less likely that people would become lifelong addicts.

“With this legislation, we’ll be targeting the age group at which the overwhelming majority of smokers start,” Ms. Quinn said in announcing the legislation at a City Hall news conference.

While officials focused on the public health aspect of the age limitation, the announcement was also infused with political overtones. In the past, Mr. Bloomberg had always been on hand, standing in front of television cameras to boldly promote public health initiatives. But on Monday he was nowhere to be seen, allowing Dr. Farley to represent the administration and seemingly ceding the spotlight to Ms. Quinn, who initiated the proposal.

By proposing the legislation, Ms. Quinn, a Democrat who polls show is a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Bloomberg, appeared to be positioning herself to follow in his footsteps as a mayor who would make public health a top priority.

Mr. Bloomberg, in fact, had opposed a similar measure in 2006, arguing that raising the age to buy cigarettes would actually make smoking more enticing to teenagers. But he now believes differently, a spokeswoman said, because the city’s youth smoking rate has plateaued and recent research has suggested a correlation between a higher smoking age and lower smoking rates.

In interviews, many New Yorkers were largely critical of the proposal, viewing it as an attack on the maturity and self-determination of young people.

“By 18, people are responsible enough to make their own decisions,” said Erik Malave, 23, a music production student at City College. “Forcing people to make themselves healthy tends not to work.”

Mr. Malave, from Yonkers, has been smoking for about three years, and he breaks for a cigarette four or five times a day. He also said that he thought the law would be a waste of time, and that young people would easily acquire cigarettes if they wanted them. “When I turned 18, I bought cigarettes for all my friends who weren’t 18,” he said.

Jessette Bautista, 21, began smoking when she was 17 and had no problem getting cigarettes from friends who would buy packs for her. She was surprised to hear about a proposal to change the legal age to purchase cigarettes. “What happened to freedom?” she said.

While alcohol may impair a person’s judgment and so warrants a law that requires partakers to be 21 or older, Ms. Bautista said, cigarettes do not alter a person’s state of mind. “Cigarettes will not intoxicate you the same way as alcohol,” she said. “It will not put you under any influence.”

Under the proposal, the buyer would not be violating the law, but the seller would be. Fines and other penalties for selling cigarettes to minors would remain as they are now and would be imposed on the sellers, not the buyers or their parents.

Asked whether the proposal would infantilize young people, Ms. Quinn said that age 21 “seems to me to track very much with a point we have marked in society” about when people are capable of making decisions about certain potentially risky behaviors like drinking.

She said there was “clear data” that 80 percent of smokers started before age 21, adding, “We have an ability to intervene on that and make a difference.”

Dr. Farley lamented that after 10 years of decline, the youth smoking rate in the city had stalled at 8.5 percent in 2007, with 20,000 public high school students currently smoking. The rate of smoking among adults has declined from 21.5 percent in 2002 to 14.8 percent in 2011, a 31 percent decrease. In the past, city officials have suggested that public education campaigns have been effective in persuading many young people never to start smoking.

The Council is considering a Bloomberg proposal to require retailers to keep tobacco products where customers cannot see them, which the mayor said would shield children from tobacco marketing and keep people from buying cigarettes on impulse.

In pushing their latest antismoking initiative, city officials cited a 2010 study in England showing that smoking among 16- to 17-year-olds dropped by 30 percent after the legal age of sale for cigarettes was raised to 18 from 16 in 2007.

The New York proposal has to be approved by the Council and signed by the mayor, but its enactment is likely since it is being promoted by Ms. Quinn and is supported by Mr. Bloomberg.

The smoking age is 18 in most of the country, but some states have made it 19. Some counties have also adopted 19, including Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island. Needham, Mass., a suburb of Boston, raised the smoking age to 21 in 2005.

California and Texas have been at the forefront of the fight to raise the tobacco sale age to 21, but have been stymied by fears of lost tax revenue. Ms. Quinn argued that health care savings would more than make up for any potential tax revenue losses.

New York officials estimated that raising the age to 21 would reduce the smoking rate among 18- to 20-year-olds by 55 percent, and by two-thirds among 14- to 17-year-olds.

Sheelagh McNeill and Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.Sheelagh McNeill and Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.

Read Sample Responses below, then take a stand and give your own opinion!

• Earl Horton
• Harlem,Ny

NYT Pick

We can send our 18 year children to fight in wars, yet Bloomberg/Quinn want to ban them from smoking cigarettes that are harmful? Yes we all should encourage better health and the conditions that produce that result. However, when I see young soldiers that return from war maimed or facing PTSD, or, those that return deceased, it begs to question the necessity for these wars and the benefits. How about a ban on war? Or inferior public education, high food prices, unaffordable housing , unemployment etc.?

At what point do we intrude on the rights of others to make decisions for themselves? There are many hazards and potential hazards in this world today; medications today have so many potential side effects you wonder how it ever obtained approval.

Bloomberg/Quinn say nothing about the unhealthy food establishments in many poor communities that already suffer from a litany of health issues. They are being disingenuous to declare that the concern for the health of our young people is the impetus for banning an 18year old to make a choice as to how they want to live their life. It is disgusting how there are so many issues with the closing of hospitals and such, for them to impose upon a segment of our society and tell them what they can or cannot do; it's Non- American, and an obvious distraction to the issues that matter to the average 18 New Yorker.

• amdoc
• New York, NY
• Verified

NYT Pick

We have to create conditions that make the initiation of smoking more difficult.

It isn't the 18-21 year old who starts smoking, but the 13-16 year old. In urban areas, these young people do not buy their cigarettes by the pack (too expensive), but buy them individually ("loosies"), from classmates, dealers on the streets and from bodegas and other storefronts. Laws already exist banning such sales, but enforcement is weak. In addition, many young people, particularly in urban areas, start smoking for reasons other than the taste of cigarette smoke and therefore choose mentholated cigarettes to make the act of smoking more palatable.

It may seem far-fetched, but the banning of mentholated cigarettes might do more to reduce the initiation of cigarette smoking than almost any other measure.

• Cobbasai
• Dallas

NYT Pick

I would say--just as famdoc pointed out--that the majority people are introduced to smoking far before they reach legal age. I smoked for 6 months--a rather brief time, but it did take place when I was 15. Accessibility to tobacco was not an issue. Sympathizing smokers would casually buy cigarettes for us minors without a whiff of compunction. Indeed, in the lower social strata in which I grew up--in the Deep South, mind you--smoking was somewhat obligatory. Laws were enforced in fits of protest by a few outliers, who viewed smoking for what it was ( a bad habit), but most of us went about our business as if those opinions didn't exist.

According to my slight knowledge of psychology/neuroscience, it's obvious that we, at that time, when the brain is in development, that neuronal connections are forged that make it all but impossible to quit smoking; smoking is ingrained within the physical structure of your brain.

Protection for the young is paramount. Even the hypothesis that "out of sight, out of mind" would lead to fewer smokers seems like like a worthwhile experiment.

Post: TAKE A STAND à BE PERSUASIVE!

1. Respond to the questions on the bottom of each AoW or post an original response.  Use text evidence to support your response.
2. Reply (comment) to a teammate's response  Summarize the argument made then add your own thoughts and evidence.  Finally, post a question to keep the conversation going.  Use text evidence to support your response.

1. Keep the conversation going with thoughtful, text-based responses.  Use text evidence to support your response.

Answer any of the following questions:

• What do you think about Health Commissioner Farley and Council Speaker Quinn’s proposal to raise the legal age for cigarette purchases? Is this similar or different from other times when the city passes laws that affect New Yorkers’ health (for example, the proposed sugary drink ban)?

• Do you think making this ban (or similar bans) infringes on one's individual rights?  Why or why not? 

• Other than passing laws, what else can people do to make healthier choices? Explain and give specific examples