09/10/09: Interacting with Rotary

Last Saturday, Chris, Alex and I went to an Interact Club kickoff party for District 5160, which is the California Region of Rotary International. Essentially, Interact is the high school branch of Rotary. Judith Glass, this year’s President of the Berkeley Rotary club, has high hopes for creating a community based Interact club this year, and the teens are excited to begin program planning.

Like other Rotary club events I’ve attended in the past, this kickoff party was full of great networking opportunities and camaraderie. It was great to meet other high school students who possessed a similar desire to change the world and be leaders in their community, just like the Teen Task Force is doing right now with our project.

I learned that the work of the local Interact clubs stretches to the very far corners of the world. One popular project that many clubs participated in was the eyeglasses drive. The clubs collected used eyeglasses from community members, and shipped them to third world countries, where access to such basic necessities is limited. I really enjoyed learning about both the local and global focuses of Rotary International. As we go forward with trying to get our own club off the ground, we are looking forward to a strong partnership with Berkeley Rotary club. If everything goes well, we should have a club up and running before the Teen Center opens, so that we can launch a big service project once the Teen Center opens in November 2010!

09/04/09: Shock and Awe

Recently, John, Antonia and I had a meeting with Raphael Maldanado. We met up with Raphael to learn and discuss what types of lighting there are and what types of lighting we should use for the building. I learned a lot about the difference between amps, watts, lumens, Calvin’s, and voltage, which I found to be quite interesting. After the learning segment, we then took Raphael on a tour of the Teen Center so he could give us more pointers. He explained the different types of lighting such as display, task and general lighting. I was awed. I had no idea there could be so much information! Towards the end of the tour, Raphael gave us an awesome suggestion- to build in mini mural areas with display lighting, where teens can create and change the mural every month. Of course, we would have these inside the walls of the Teen Center. I really hope we can implement this…hmm.

09/03/09: Green Education!

In our Teen Center, we want to make sure we have lots of green education! What’s green education you ask? In our case, it is teaching you about all of the environmentally sustainable aspects of our building, and how we incorporated living and being green into our design. We are working with Laura Billings to help make the building more sustainable. As well as us learning about being green while working with Laura, we also want the future Teen Center users to learn about being green and how the building helps us do that. We’re currently brainstorming ideas to put into the Teen Center that are visual or interactive to teach people about how green we are, and what types of things helped to make the Teen Center green. We hope to teach the community how to be greener and in a fun visual way.

If you have ideas on how to teach Teen Center users about sustainability, let us know!

09/01/09: The Girls Go Shopping...for Blinds

About 2 weeks ago, Tracy put Alex and me in charge of researching blinds and the price and quality that would be used in the future Teen Center. Our first place to research was in a shade shop in Berkeley. In order to go to the shop we had to take a bus, which we sat on forever to get to the shop, due to many stops. When arriving to the shop, we saw every type of blind that we could imagine. There were different types of materials, color and prices but the one that took our attention was the honeycomb shades with the top down/bottom up system. Based on what we liked and from other research that we did in the internet, we presented a powerpoint to the whole Teen Task Force including the prices and the details of each type of shades. After our presentation, we asked a few questions of our LEED Consultant, Laura Billings, because we are trying to have green and environmentally safe materials in our blinds in order to have better indoor air quality. Now we are going to order samples of blinds, discuss at our meeting about our options and make a final decision on which blinds are going to be in the Teen Center.