Unpacking Coding

At this month's coding event, the students really began to find their feet, as the challenge increased. The problems were a little more intricate than they'd expected and many were excited to be working so hard.
Students were broken into teams, for the most part, and those teams worked with one another to propose solutions to the various problems. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar, coding problems usually take the form, "Write a program that does this, then this, then this." One of the example we worked on had the students write a program that asked a few questions and put the answer together in a cogent sentence. 

The most exciting thing about the coding project, for many of the students, is there are multiple ways to achieve the same result. Some are more elegant than others for sure, but working out the less elegant ones can lead to new shortcuts and innovations. Over the coming months, the students will continue to refine their skills. Stay tuned for more updates as our journey continues. 

3rd Friday Halloween Happenings

We made lots of new friends at 3rd Friday. 

The Delmar MiM Club wanted to start participating in the 3rd Friday event to get the word out about youth volunteerism. One of the things MiM prides itself on is the ability to find or create volunteer opportunities that are fun, but also give youth the opportunity to begin developing skills they can use in their everyday lives. 

Organizing is a particularly difficult skill to acquire, because it isn't always easy to find a cause or event to organize around. That said, learning to coordinate your peers and to lead them to act is an important skill the students try and develop. Salisbury's 3rd Friday is an opportunity for the students to accomplish both. Since it is a monthly event, there always is something to coordinate.

The Year of the YAT

The Youth Action Team (YAT) is a group of students that run the annual Youth Leadership Academy. This year, they fought through snow and sleet and the crushing weight of increasing responsibility to pull off a fantastic academy. Each month they met and planned. They argued, compromised, encouraged one another, and cooperated until they had a strong vision for the 2014 YLA.

The group had a January kickoff wherein last year's YLA participants met at Salisbury University for a conference focusing on leadership values and basic life skills. We played games with local leaders, like Councilman Jacob Day, and heard Charlie Endicott of Salisbury University, speak on career planning.

Throughout the rest of the year, the students met to begin planning the YLA. We started off meeting in the Wicomico Public Library, but eventually had the opportunity to take advantage of meeting at the +Community Foundation of the Eastern Shore, Inc.  which is a great community resource.

Having a meal together was important to the YAT for several reasons. Primarily, since we met from 5:30 to 7:30 each evening, we wanted to make sure everyone was fed and alert for the duration of the meeting. Secondly, though, since the students were from disparate neighborhoods, schools, and backgrounds, it was important to give them some time to get to know one another socially as the weeks progressed. The CFES was great for our needs, Not only were there better facilities for enjoying our dinners...

.. but when the World Cup heated up, we were able to watch the game during the meeting. Several of the girls on the YAT were not interested in soccer, but agreed to put on the game in deference to their colleagues. As the U.S. played Belgium to a tie and goalie Tim Howard made unreasonable save after unreasonable save, the girls were screaming with every blocked shot, then demanding explanations from their fellows in the quiet time so they could better understand what was going on. For all the meetings and practices, this was the kind of experience that separated the YAT from an ordinary club.

Throughout the year, many of the YAT also participated in the +Make it Matter Movement projects, which allowed the two groups to better coalesce. MiM members learned about the necessity of practicing leadership as well as stewardship, and the YAT got to see the premises of leadership they were discussing put into action.  In all, it was a strong, group of youth that eventually became the core of what we hope will by the YAT of the future.

Each week, we planned a little more and, by the time August rolled around, we were ready for the Youth Leadership Academy.  The YLA was a massive success and, over the next few posts, we'll take you day by day through the successes and challenges of the YLA...

Changing the culture

Composting has always been seen as a rural endeavor, something for earthy hippies who don't mind the occasional scent of decomposition invading their backyard. And to some extent, that is true, but lately some of us have been wondering, "What if it weren't?" Make it Matter Movement (MiM) volunteers began to imagine a world wherein composting was the norm, rather than some esoteric endeavor. After all, MiM members grew up in the recycling world.

Emerging Recycling Culture

For those of us over 40, recycling is something we had to learn to do. When we were younger, we got letters from our municipalities telling us there would be special collections for garbage. Over the last decade, an increasing number of places consider recycling something of a social responsibility. Many places that don't offer  curbside pickup at least have a centrally-located recycling drop off point.

While the recycling efforts over the last two decades has begun to put the breaks on a garbage epidemic, it has not succeeded completely. The cost of trash continues to be a serious concern for local, county and state officials across the country. In New York City, there is a burgeoning movement to make food recycling, or composting, mandatory in the way material recycling is now mandatory. Increasing number of offices have different garbage cans for paper, plastic, glass and trash. Visitors in most homes ask "Where is the recycling bin?" rather than, "Where's the trashcan?" Recycling is pretty much the norm.

A Revolutionary Idea


MiM volunteers came up with the following proposition: What if the next generation sees food composting as normal? Their goal was to kick off the normalization of kitchen composting on the Eastern Shore with an event that promoted the practice as well as taught it to local families.

Partnering with the Delmarva Zoological Society, The Home Depot, the Community Foundation of the Eastern Shore and the Foundation in Human Potential, MiM built a vermiculture display designed to be a permanent fixture at the Salisbury Zoo. As part of the display, the kids made a video, describing how to make "under-the-sink" vermiculture boxes at home.

If the first aspect of the MiM vermiculture project was permanence, the second was sustainability. To that end, MiM provided free vermiculture boxes to the first 100 children who attended the event. As the children arrived, MiM volunteers taught them (and their parents) how to put a box together and, most importantly, how to maintain it.

Critical Worm Facts


The boxes the children were given will double the worm population every 90 days. That means, eventually, the boxes will fill with worms and dirt. The children were encouraged to either spread the excess worms and dirt into their gardens, or to give a friend the excess worms so the friend could start their own composting box. Even if only a few children spread the word, entire families left the zoo that day with a better understanding of the ease as well as of the importance of food recycling.

It's just a start, but when recycling bins began showing up throughout the 1980s people joked about having to sort their garbage. By the 1990s people stopped joking and, by the turn of the century, recycling has become a given. Many participants joked about keeping worms in their kitchens as the program began.

Many more will continue joking about "under-the-sink" composting for some time. But as the children who participated in Saturday's event come of age, and as MiM volunteers take their places as community leaders, the idea of food recycling won't seem so weird. Moreover, the necessity for it will be clearer than ever.

First MiM Mob Sets the Tone

We were nervous about our first big MiM Mob. Mostly it was just stage freight in advance of our organization's debut. MiM prides itself on sponsoring students who are self starters, taking natural leaders and helping them focus their energies. It was important our first event be more than just successful, we wanted to demonstrate who Make it Matter is and its capabilities.

We place utter trust in our MiM Leaders and Campus Partners to live up to their ends of the bargain. They trust us to provide support, but also to stay out of their way and let them do their jobs.

This was our first opportunity to convert theory into practice, and it was a significant success.