This week in Periclean.. we celebrated Dia de Independencia by sending our friends in Honduras a greeting (: We also went to the fiesta hosted by El Centro! There was great music and company! But of course, it wasn’t just a fiesta for the entire class.

Currently, we are working in our committees to get various tasks done. We are excited to be collaborating with LASO and El Centro to make sure our efforts with LUPE are sustainable. We are also in the process of finding speakers, companies, etc. for our very exciting business summit happening in February!

We are also planning the class trip to Honduras for this winter term. We are excited that our trip has been approved because it has been a lot of work! We have various members of the class who are interested in going to Honduras and spending time with our partner Hope for Honduran Children!

Cookies to go-go is back! Keep an eye out for when cookie orders begin so you can all get some delicious, warm cookies, while also supporting Periclean!

The past few weeks we have broken up into committees for the majority of our class. We have found that this is an efficient way to get work done for each initiative we have committed to. We are excited about the work we are doing with Summit in Honduras, Hope for Honduran Children and LUPE. We are also developing our plans for the business summit that will be held next spring. We are in the process of getting this event approved by Elon.

Members of our class had the pleasure of attending a LUPE board meeting this past week. This was very beneficial in further determining what LUPE is and how we can help them! We have decided to research grants in order to find funding for one of their specific needs. We would like to collaborate with LUPE in writing the grant in order for this to be a sustainable process. It would be advantageous for their organization to have grant writing skills that can regularly support their organization.

The Summit in Honduras committee was able to Skype with Maggie! They had a great conversation with her about potential ways we can help her organization. We are trying to focus on plans that we can achieve here, rather than projects that would require us to be in Honduras. We got very exciting news that one of the Hope for Honduran boys will be working with Summit. We are all very excited that our partners have formed a relationship that benefits individuals in Honduras!

Cookies to Go Go was a successful event again this year! We raised over $300.00! These funds will go toward providing children in Honduras with school supplies through Hope for Honduran Children.

We are all very excited to meet the new class of Pericleans at the Induction Ceremony on Thursday!

We had the pleasure of talking with Suyapa at our class on Tuesday. We had a really good conversation with her, about the work she does in the local communities, as well as her personal experiences which have shaped her generosity today. Suyapa hosts spanish classes for children (between the ages of 7-16) on saturday mornings to learn the mechanics of spanish. She started this program because she noticed in our community that children with spanish as their predominant language struggled to read and write it because it wasn’t being taught in schools.  With this program in mind, we are going to have members of our class attend a saturday session and see if we could be helpful in any way! We are looking into volunteering to help the children strengthen their spanish writing/reading skills, as well as possibly teaching the families english!

We also talked to Suyapa about LUPE (Latinos Unidos Promoviendo la Esperanza).  LUPE is an organization that seeks out to strengthen the Latin American community in our area.  They offer various educational sessions that families can attend. One of the pivotal focus points of LUPE is education about nutrition, which Suyapa is very passionate about.

Here are some links for more information about LUPE, it’s a great organization and we encourage you all to check them out!

https://www.facebook.com/lupenc and http://www.lupe-nc.org/

 

Our second class of the semester was also very productive! We continued to work on the planning for the Periclean in Residence event. We broke up into groups and worked out several details pertaining to the week ahead! We have been brainstorming panel questions, deciding on meals to share with our panelists, and discussing details with Dr. Monico.

Dr. Monico came into our class  to discuss some of the details of the event. She looked over our questions and thought they were good! We are really excited to have her on the panel, she is an amazing person with a plethora of information pertaining to the topic we will be diving into.

We were really lucky to be able to look into some of Dr. Monico’s contacts, all that would be wonderful people to offer extensive information about issues in Central America, as well as issues in our own community. Dr. Monico will be meeting with the UNCG Center for New North Carolinians (discussed in the post from last class) this coming friday to hopefully help us initiate a relationship with them!

We will be working on the final details for next week within the few days we have left. We are finishing designing a program for the panel event, as well as touching up questions and introductions for the panelists. We are getting really excited for next week, and we hope to see many Pericleans at the panel 🙂

Week 2: 2/11/14

Submitted by: Dawson Nicholson (mnicholson3@elon.edu) and Megan Griffin (mgriffin10@elon.edu)

Absent:  Facilitators: Morgan Abate and Erin Lanzotti

II. Fake break trip with Hope for Honduran Children-Meredith, Christian and April

A. Treats from Honduras

B. What we did

– Visited Flor Azul farm and orphanage, visited new HFHC Transition home

– Took video footage and interviews for Sundance Film Festival Entry

– Isabel mentioned being interested in helping this project

-Interviewed some of the boys and recieved some really great insight from them

All of them are very appreciative of their situation and they want to make the best of it (go to college/go to the transitional home)

C. Observations about the organization

– Transition House = awesome way for Periclean to get involved and in a    sustainable way

– Many aspects such as delegation of tasks could be handled better and in a more sustainable way -> potential project: audit organization to improve sustainability

– CRHP model (Periclean: India) could be adopted and put into the works for HFHC

E. Question/Answer

– Where would we fit into this? -> so many options (Supporting a child financially, writing an external grant, building facilities, help out with sustainability of the organization, etc.), Will be on the report and discussed next class.

-More potential projects:

making a CD from audio and selling it

selling bracelets→ maybe having different departments order bracelets specific to their department

Setting up distributors for jewelry

Donate laptops

-Will there be a committee that focuses solely on this? → Thinking about having a committee of 4 or 5 people. Some ideas for the committee include, answering some of Karen’s daily emails about trip details, making the website better (with a promo), basically manage the projects with Karen

F. Discussion in small groups about findings on “Founderitis” and partnership with H4HC (Did not get this far)

G. Deadline timeline. Time to go home and process. Make a decision by next class.

Next Class: Meredith and Christian will have a report for the class to read and the class will bring questions; make a  timeline and establish a focus

Lately in class we have been updating each other on various news articles regarding current events in Honduras. We have been trying to get a broad overview of the country and some issues the people face by discussing various aspects of the Honduran news, including the arts, US-Honduras relations, human rights, technology, and much more.

Sharing information about Honduras with our class is one of the first steps to making a decision about what project we want to do and who we want to partner with.  Many of us found disheartening, negative news articles, which speaks as a testament to the broken state of the country. Though that seemed like the best way to brainstorm and formulate ideas about a potential project, it was definitely refreshing when someone shared a positive piece of news! Some of the topics that were discussed included the treatment of homosexuals in Honduras, innovative new technology, the judicial system, and education in Honduras.

For example, two unique and creative topics that class members brought up were an initiative to build schools in rural areas to encourage children to go to school, and spreading social awareness through graffiti.  One specific artist in Honduras does graffiti art of popular art pieces and puts objects related to violence on them to make people aware of gang violence.

 

As a class we also discussed ways to understand Honduras from a citizen’s point of view. We talked about finding and examining a blog that was based solely on the opinions of people in Honduras-although we noted the potential drawbacks to this method, we will continue to look into it. Another way to understand some of the opinions of people in Honduras (that April suggested) was to read the comments and reactions under news articles within Honduran newspapers.

 

In terms of looking towards the future as a class, we have much to do in the short term. For the next few classes we will be working toward creating our elevator speech for the Periclean celebration on October tenth. We are excited to begin brainstorming our mission statement and incorporating everyone’s ideas into the video. A goal we unanimously agreed on as a class was getting the word out about this amazing program, and are looking into talking to global classes this semester as well as next.

On Wednesday, the 18th, we had the amazing opportunity to Skype with Tesla, an Elon alum, and some of her colleagues that work with the corporate social responsibility department at Cargill in Honduras. Though I-and many of my fellow Pericleans-were skeptical of how a big corporation that by choice “stays under the radar” could galvanize so much positive change in the community and still maintain profitability, the workers assured us that Cargill is a company that not only embraces a socially responsible business model but goes above and beyond to keep their workers happy and living as global citizens. In Honduras specifically, Cargill has several initiatives that all focus around education, nutrition, and health. Their “Nourishing the Future” campaign is specific to the country and is a comprehensive plan that includes but is not limited to building school kitchens, strongly encouraging employees to commit to community service, and partnering with CARE. One relatively new initiative is a partnership with other large companies and  the resulting “Vos Que Haras Por Honduras” campaign (https://www.facebook.com/XHonduras) that we would really like to delve into researching more about.

 

Since we have kept a potential partnership with this company in our minds since the beginning of class, the skype sessions sparked a serious discussion on our options that will undoubtedly not be the last of its kind. We’ve already learned that partnerships, especially with corporations, can be a slippery slope and its extremely important to be cautious of who and what you align your organization with. However; it was fantastic to get insight about the company from an insider’s point of view and it was great to see that the employees really love their jobs and are invested and believe in what the company is trying to accomplish in Honduras. We definitely have a lot to think about!

-Megan Griffin & Lexie Melanson ‘16