Last Week of CLUES

This week was the last week of the CLUES Learning Together Program, an occasion we marked with ice cream and a piñata. The piñata event had taken half an hour longer than the usual program time, and we were itching to get out the door. As the last parents straggled out the door, dragging their kids who were struggling to hold on to all of their piñata loot, on of the older kids said rather cryptically, “I’ll miss school on Wednesdays.” The program coordinator thanked us profusely for coming every week, and said that without reliable childcare, the program could not have happened. We thanked her for the opportunity to practice our Spanish and hang out with kids, and then we left for the CEC-sponsored ice cream reflection on the experience. Here are some of my reflections: maybe the frustration I have had with the program for its haphazard volunteer crew assembly, irrelevant curriculum, and the lack of cohesiveness within my volunteer group were much less important to the actual program than they were to my satisfaction as a volunteer, which maybe has more to do with me than with the organization. The program coordinator emphasized the importance of having reliable childcare; while I had been critical of the manner in which the childcare had been carried out, the kids certainly had fun and were safe and the parents could go on with their workshop knowing that their children were being well supervised. And the kids did not notice that we had been unable to implement the lessons suggested by the program, they just had fun running themselves into cranky exhaustion every Wednesday evening. I do think that the process and commitment of the volunteer group is still a valid concern. The group of 5 of us who volunteered at CLUES just signed up for the job without any time of selection process, training, or expectation about our participation in the commitment. We came at it from different places and expecting different outcomes; I think that it would be valuable for future groups to think through their goals for participating in civic engagement and establish a group vision with a mechanism to process, reflect and assess whether or not we are meeting those goals. I think this intentionality would benefit the volunteers primarily, but also improve the interaction between Macalester students, the partner organization, and the participants in the program. I think I learned a little bit about the different advantages students have depending on how capable their parents are at navigating the exosystem and macrosystem through their access to the mesosystem. I think I learned more about my needs in the context of civic engagement activity, and I think I would like to do this program again with a space for more formal process.