60% That's a lot of work

This week we had a guest speaker and something she said really stuck with me, 60% of your work on grant writing is your homework. All I kept thinking after she said that was WOW. Then she whipped out a pile of papers the size of a small tree and told us that it had been condensed to twelve pages. Seriously twelve pages. I would have cried with all that work to waste. But, after I left I began to wonder if it was waste. She got the money after all. The cause that she believed so desperately in was granted funds to continue to operate. Is the 60% worth it then? I thinks so. But, with all good things, there must be a catch. The work is only worth it if you believe 100% in the project. I can do the 60%, I can toil for hours on a specific cause and give it my all, but if my passion and belief is at 40% then I will see the work as useless and the project probably won't get funded. So although your home work must be at 60% your passion must be the full 100.

Extra! Extra! Write all about it.

Editorials, everyone's favorite section of the newspaper. Well, not everyone. My grandmother has some weird fascination with the obituary page, something that I'm sure has to do with her age. Regardless of that, I'm sure that Editorials and Op-Ed pages have made more people laugh then Family Circus and Dilbert put together. Editorials have also sparked anger, fear, and tears.  
This week my Writing For Change teacher has assigned me the task of writing one of those feeling inducing editorials, in five hundred to a thousand words no less. Short pieces aren't my strong point, I tend to blabber on, trying to squeeze everything I want a person to know into my work. So, for me the challenge was to hit the high points while keeping it snappy and engaging.
I did this by asking myself what the key points of my non-profit were. There is no point in throwing in every fact and statistic that I have on New York Says Thank You. For one it's boring and way over whelming and for two they don't mean much to anyone who isn't invested in the organization and their problem. My job was to begin to get them invested so that they wanted to search out those facts and figures. My first draft had two thousand words, my second somewhere around seven hundred. Learning to use one word instead of three and to take out frivolous sentences allowed me to reach that five hundred to a thousand word goal while still creating an editorial I am proud of

Mission Accomplished.

New Light, New Screwups Who Would Have Thunk it.

If childhood sports taught me anything it is that for every loser there is a winner, someone that came out on top. It is common knowledge that people make money everyday on the heartache and devastation of people. However, I was still shocked to learn just how much some people prospered off of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I guess that's my never ending optimism showing through, I always have to believe the best in people, it's a real problem.
By chapter 8 of Dyson's book we had already learned that the years before and the weeks following Katrina the government, federal, state, and local, screwed Gulf Coast citizens, especially those who lived in New Orleans, seven days to Sunday when it came to their safety and well being. But, chapter 8 brought to light a whole new set of screwing over that was done.
I was horrified to learn of the amount of carpet bagging that was done following the weeks after Katrina. My sister, the history major, kindly reminded me that during every reconstruction throughout history comes the leeches ready to suck up every dollar that they can. And, suck up every dollar they did, by way of government contracts and home purchases. They left the victims with less than nothing walking away with their pockets lined in blood soaked gold. But, I wondered on the last page of the chapter what can be done now? The contracts have been signed, the homes purchased, the lives destroyed. How do we make right what so unjustly happened to the people long after the waves of Katrina washed away their homes. 

Are You Kidding Me

Sorry once again that I have been absent. I am the worst at remembering to blog. Which in a way is incredibly funny since I have so much to say. This week my thoughts on the whole situation involving Hurricane Katrina, or as I like to know call the time America showed its ass, is are you kidding me. Well to be fair my first thought was are you shitting me but I'm working on my language in public. So, back to the astounded part. Chapter seven in Dyson, a book that any angry person should read, showed me more then ever before the true incompetence of those involved in this situation. Half way through I really just wanted to scream drive the damn buses in there anyway. Before this class, I always thought that the government excepted help from anywhere that they could, but this week I find out that is not the case. My class and I have argued the point as to whether or not we should have accepted help from other governments, and no matter where you stand I can see both points. However, it should never have been a question about whether or not we accept help from other Americans. If you go a bus, plane, or train we'll take it should have been the cry. No one should have waited twelve hours to hear back from FEMA. In this situation the red tape should have stayed locked inside the draw where it belonged not dangled out for all the world to see. Papers could have been signed in the weeks after, people are who mattered then. By the end of the chapter my cry was fire them all, something I still stand firmly behind.