As the semester comes to a close, the Periclean Scholars Class of 2016 is proud of its accomplishments over the past year. We have formed a partnership with Hope for Honduran Children, and are seriously considering another partnership that may work well with our existing partnerships. We anxiously await the chance to bring these two partners to Elon next fall as Pericleans in Residence with the hopes of determining how our class can be most effective in Honduras.
This past week, we worked together on our two-year-plan. It was exciting to see how far the class has come, as we attempted this overwhelming task in an effective, patient way. Everyone listened to one another and worked off each other’s ideas to come up with the most efficient, and feasible, 2-year plan. To tackle this difficult task, we made a chart including a space for each semester starting with the Fall of 2014 and ending with the Spring of 2016. A few major topics that we included in each semester were: fundraising efforts, grant writing and letter writing campaigns, local outreach, and building our partnerships Honduras. We have found that setting specific fundraising goals per-semester is difficult, because we have not committed to a specific project or focus as of now. Instead we decided to set goals of the number of fundraising events we will hold each semester. Looking at the Fall of 2014, the class struggled to determine the best way to keep the Pericleans abroad in contact, and to determine a feasible plan for the fall when the majority of our cohort is studying abroad. We have decided to send one e-mail a week to the students who are abroad, which will include anything we have discussed, and will provide them with the chances to vote when necessary. It was encouraging to see that most of the members who plan to study abroad trust the class to make decisions that will be great for the whole class, and for our partners. Overall we had a very successful discussion as we planned out the rest of our time together, including what we can do Pan-Periclean.
At the end of class, we broke into our committees to give some final updates. We are excited to announce that we have established a pen-pal system with boys living in two different communities in Honduras: the Flor Azul Boys Community and the Transition Home. We have connected with these communities through our partner, Hope for Honduran Children, and are excited to get to know the boys on a more personal level, so that we can really learn from them. Our final group meeting will be this Tuesday, May 13, as we say goodbye to our Pericleans studying abroad, and look forward to the exciting progress we can make next year.
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