National Youth Institute---Day 3

It was really hard to get up this morning after being awake so late for the dance. We were definitely not the only group that was super tired. It seemed like a number of people left early because of travel, but there were still enough there for things to happen. We missed the social media session on Sunday morning (could this be where they showed the videos? I never did see them!) because there was just no way we were getting up at 6:30 for a 7:15 session. After breakfast, we checked out and headed to the conference hotel and our second session.
We spent 4 hours working on our action plans for next year's birthday party project. I'm afraid that I was so brain dead at this point that when the groups started explaining their projects, I became lost. I thought everybody was talking about their clubs, even though I knew from yesterday that most of the people didn't have active clubs! I got some nasty looks from the other groups, which I definitely deserved. I am pretty sure that my brain oozed out of my ears at that point.
When it was our turn to present, I made the youth do it. It seemed to go well, and we had fleshed out some of the ideas we had from the previous work period including specific places to get donations from for the project, and how to present it to our principal.
The only real downside to the presentations was that one of the people in the room was very gung-ho on us being a complete Red Cross club, and felt that she really needed to explain to us how the Red Cross did things. Since this was similar to the problems we had with another service organization, we were all less than thrilled at what we were hearing. I've never really experienced another Red Cross volunteer pushing Red Cross on me, especially not in youth services! I've always run a general community service club, and while the students do things with the Red Cross because I'm active, they aren't required to participate. I was a probably little snotty when I held up my ID badge to explain to the commenter that I was a Red Cross volunteer on my own. I was pretty annoyed, although some of that was purely being tired. I'm still minorly annoyed, as you can tell, since I'm blogging about it... I hope that everything will settle out, since one of the students who came with me expressed an interest in doing things at the chapter as well over the summer the previous evening. Overall, though, the conference was well done. I think we are going to try and go there next year, especially if the price stays at $75. It would be nice if it was a little closer; then we could drive and take more students.

Pictures from NYI Day 3--6/1/08