Updates on new program and Upcoming Concert

We have a star player on our team and I would like to acknowledge Megan for her outstanding work in creating the Adult Literacy Program. This is a new program that will work in conjunction with another Temple program that works with adult GED tutoring. It’s called Workforce Education & Adult Literacy Service. The purpose for this program is to help adults who struggle with a range from illiteracy to a 6th grade reading level and then they can be placed in the GED program. It will be held at the Church on Broad and Diamond which has agreed to serve as a community space. The program will be up and running in January.

Also at the Baptist church is a literacy program for kids. 

For more information, call (215) 204-2560 M-F 9:30am-4:30pm. Registration is open until December 17^th.

Berean Youth Ministry is an illiteracy program through Berean Presbyterian Church for grades K-12. It’s every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings. For more information, please call: (215) 769-2788.

Also the upcoming concert series is next week on Thursday, November 11^th at World Café Live. This will be a musical collaboration of Temple student bands, representing genres such as rap, funk, singer-songwriter, jazz, indie-rock, and celtic, all coming together to support education reform efforts in Philadelphia schools! The performers will include GuerillaFunk, Brittany Anne Tranbaugh, Burning Bridget Cleary, and the Flying Buttresses of Tree Bark County.

Stay too for more fun stuff we will be doing.

An On Going Project

Project EDU is an on going effort that works to engage temple students in community and school activities. Inspiring students of all ages by encouraging them to be active, creative and curious.  We hosted a successful yard sale fundraiser in the Howard Gratis Student Activities center, and managed to raise over a hundred and fifty dollars from sales of donated odds and ends. We also hosted a kids party on Halloween. 

Updates: Next month we look forward to installing libraries in High School classrooms for Operation Bookshelf. Art Education Club has been having cultural workshops at pennrose community center and tree house books, each week the kids learn about a different culture and make art from that culture. Urban Roots has found a garden at John Welsh elementary school and we are looking forward to gardening and business classes and working in conjunction with Entrepreneur Student Association and the Temple Community Garden clubs. Academic Coaching has started tutoring at Simon Gratz High School and students travel to the high school to assist the High Schoolers with their school assignments and overall reading, writing and or math skills. 

We are working also on a few technical aspects of planning at the moment in order to become a 501C3 organization that would solidify Project EDU as an organization independent of Temple and on Government record as a non-profit organization. 

A major concern of ours at the moment is member outreach and retention. We have many wonderful projects happening simultaneously and it takes a lot of heads and hands to get all these tasks accomplished and functional. We are hoping to find new ways to encourage more people to join the cause and help us make a great name for Temple students in these near by schools. Some ideas we had were handing out flyers for events and programs just before the meeting outside the student center. Heavy facebook advertising was another idea that came up, with all the existing members urging their friends to add our page and then creating lots of events and regular status updates to keep people up on what we are doing on the day to day as well as the long run. Also we mentioned announcements in education classes may help with turn out, since many of these classes require some sort of community service over the semester. Most of these methods if not all have to do with word of mouth; what it comes down to is we need to spread the word! so help me out and tell a friend!

Remember if you are interested in coming to a meeting, they are help Wednesdays at 4pm in the student center 217C. Thanks for reading!

The parts that make up the whole of Project E.D.U.

We have many clubs and operations and programs within our organization so that no matter what it is that a person is interested in they can become involved in their community through our organization. So you may ask, how can a person get involved? The programs we have are still growing as more are being thought up and developed but currently are as follows:

• Academic Coaching
  
• Art Education Club
  
• Operation Bookshelf
  
• Philly Eco Kids (PEK)
  
• Urban Roots
  

These are fairly self explanatory names but I want to tell you a little bit about the plans and goals of each program.

-Academic Coaching is a mentoring program where we go into schools during class time and assist kids with homework assignments, and basic reading and math skills. This is so that they have more help available than just the teacher and also so that we can see what areas in each school needs the most attention for the students to achieve better.

-Art Education Club focuses on creative projects and has teachers and teachers assistants (volunteers for our club who have gotten special clearances to teach in schools) and we run workshops on all different art forms with students at temple and local artists and musicians. One of the major goals of this project is the mural project. This is a plan the organization has had since the creation of Project E.D.U last year. We want to collaborate with the community to design and paint a visible mural that both the Temple student body and North Philly community can enjoy. We have been granted a wall on one of the new builds however the specifics of when we can being are vague. So in the meantime we will work to build 3 smaller temporary and movable murals to keep interest and get people involved. Just call it practice!

-Operation Bookshelf I have already mentioned in my last blog and won't go into the same detail here. This is the project where we are building from scratch, (collecting books, sorting and data basing, building the shelves, and finally installing small classroom libraries into schools. We are starting with Kensington Business HS because that is where we did our academic coaching last year and Project E.D.U. they had no library, so they were a large part of the inspiration for this project.

-PhillyEcoKids is very similar to the academic coaching program we have in that it is a basic mentoring program. The focus here though is environmental issues and empowering the kids in this problem by telling them why it is important and how they can do little things that have a bigger impact. This program is after school because it is not about academics as much as it is about inspiring youth to do more for our planet.

-Urban Roots is a program that evolved from Philly Eco Kids. At Dunbar last year we had the good fortune of rebuilding the roof garden and we found a lot of people had a big interest in gardening. We also had other organizations come forward and want to be involved in a project like this. So through some collaboration and brain power we now have Urban Roots. The goal here is to show kids how to build and maintain an urban farm, and then how to sell the goods and produce at a local farmer's market. We are working very closely with ESA entrepreneurial Student Association, and also the Temple Community Garden Club.

So these are the programs we currently have up and running and I will keep you posted over the semester to our progress and great successes. Thanks for reading!

Operation Bookshelf is off to a great start!

I am excited to report that after announcing September 1st, at the first meeting, several leadership opportunities within the organization, including Chair of Operation Bookshelf the project has made some wonderful progress after almost every position was filled. As you already know I have been promoted to Vice President, Matt has stepped up to be Treasurer. Danielle, Events Coordinator, with Genavieve as her Co-chair. As for Op Bookshelf, We have Ailsa taking over and Shane is stepping up as her Co-chair. A week ago Alex, the President of E.D.U, and I moved all of the rejected books to the wonderful {hiladelphia Book Company on Frankford Avenue. Over this past week Ailsa and Danielle managed to finish data-basing the remaining books in the office. This means the only data-basing left to do is the college textbooks in the library storage that have already been sorted through. We are projecting that in the next month we can wrap up the process, including building the shelves so that by the end of November we can begin to install the small libraries into school classrooms, beginning with our friends at Kensington Business High School. I just wanna say I am glad to see so many people excited to take an active roll in giving back to the community and working with the children. It is very inspiring and I am happy to be a part of it.

What is ProjectEDU?

You may be asking at this point what is Project EDU and why should I care? Well let me be the first to tell you. ProjectEDU is a student organization that was established last year and is working on development and building new initiatives this year. I believe it is an important organization because it is a way for Temple students to get involved with the surrounding communities, and actively participate in education reform and assist students with learning. It is rooted in education, EDU stands for Education for the Development of Unity. The idea is to bring everyone together through education and the program is commited to building relationships with students here at Temple and members of the North Philly community. I feel this is a great way for new students to meet people who are interested in the future of the youth, and the education system. It is an excellent resume builder because volunteer work speaks leagues about a person to a potential employer. Also we are actually making a difference by mentoring the youth in different areas of study and life in general. If you are interested in becoming part of the project feel free to email me. I will be using this blog to talk about different projects we are doing and why I feel they are important and necessary and to report the progress of the organization as we go along. I hope you find this blog to be interesting. Feel free to check out our web site (http://templepads.com/projectedu/) for more information on the programs we are currently working on. Check back for updates!