Building a Youth Community Center: A Transformative Journey

Abstract

Monica post I am very grateful for this class. In October I will be finished with my degree and my next step is to plan, develop, and seek funding for my own youth community center.  This course has opened this possibility, as I did not know where to start before taking it. The group work in this course was fantastic.  I have never been involved in a group where every member pulled their part. It also allowed the opportunity to understand the importance of collaboration. When beginning my community center I will model this by pulling in programs from the community and building my own team.  My hope is that it will be as efficient as our team was. Our grant proposal was 32 pages long and this was the scaled-back version. It was not difficult to achieve this with the group's participation and input. Breaking down the parts into pieces gave a nice way to focus on the task and not overlook any of the small details.  I enjoyed being able to focus on the project without a lot of extra assignments.  The lectures by Marshall Jones were informative. He gave real examples of "what works, what doesn't work, and what is promising."  I prefer the outline along with the lecture instead of the interview-style lectures.  The sound was poor quality and I didn't fee the information was captured as well as the outline form. This is the only constructive criticism I have for this course. I appreciate the prompt and consistent feedback Professor Culhane gave throughout the course. I would recommend this course to others interested in starting a program. Thank you!