Most volunteerism starts from a small seed of hope and compassionate care. And from tiny seeds, abundant gardens can bloom. The Baptist Healing Trust knows that young people who volunteer serve as an inspiration to others, and can cause a great ripple effect in communities. The Mary Catherine Strobel Volunteer Awards’ longest-serving award sponsor of nine years, Baptist Healing Trust once again will honor youth volunteers at the 2013 awards luncheon.
“Each year, we are inspired by the young people nominated for the Strobel Youth Volunteer Award,” said Catherine Self, president and CEO of Baptist Healing Trust. “Each of them is driven to volunteer by a sense of compassionate care for those who need it, and serve as powerful examples for all of us. We are truly honored to recognize Youth Volunteer Award finalists Caroline Hoffman, Iris Levine, and Ben Rosenberg at this year’s Strobel Awards.”
We are thrilled to announce the newest addition to the Hands On Nashville team! Isaiah Marshall is the new HON Youth Outreach Coordinator. Isaiah is one speedy guy, and we’re hoping we can keep up with him at HON! He was a high school All-American track star, ran track for TSU and Mississippi State, served as TSU campus president for Fellowship of Christian Athletes, has volunteered as a Big Brother with Big Brothers Big Sisters, and is currently in graduate school pursuing a Masters of Divinity Degree from Lipscomb University. We are so excited to have him join our team.
If you are a high school teacher, parent, or youth leader, and would like more information about the VolunTEEN Program or have someone speak to your group about HON’s youth volunteer and leadership opportunities, please call (615) 298-1108 Ext. 421 or email Isaiah@hon.org.
By Josh Corlew, HON Urban Agriculture Program Manager -
It was an amazing first summer at the Hands On Nashville Urban Farm! We harvested 600+ pounds of vegetables and had more than 2,000 volunteers pitch in to transform these five empty lots of flood plain into food producing space where much learning,discovery, and outdoor fun has taken place.
The Farm during peak summer harvest.
Thank you to everyone who has given their time, energy, support, and enthusiasm to make this a successful first year for the Farm! Your volunteerism makes it possible for us to grow healthy food that is donated to nonprofits that serve families in need.
But summer is over, and fall is in the air (and the ground as well). The summer crops of squash, cucumbers, beans, corn, and watermelon are gone. The tomatoes and peppers are nearing the end of their productivity. Our newly leafed out trees are beginning their hibernation process.
Fall, however, brings its own excitement. The change of the weather is invigorating, both to our volunteers who are eager to get warmed up by getting to work, as well as some of our fall crops. We have lots of herbs and flowers that are loving the cooler weather, and our kale has been pruned back and is really enjoying the reprieve from pesky bugs that this time of year brings.
Spinach seedlings pop their heads out of the soil.
We’ve also recently planted quite a bit of spinach and lettuce in some of the garden rows where squash, corn, and beans used to thrive. Now they’re just starting to pop up and leaf out. If all goes well, we’ll be in for a lot of spinach through the winter. We’ve also begun work on the new garden plot, preparing it for a very productive spring by starting some cover crops (these will fill the soil with beneficial nutrients). Next spring we plan on doubling the amount of growing space that we had this year.
Kids from Head Middle Magnet and West End Middle spent part of their fall intercession time at the Farm on Monday.
Fall also means school is back in session. This week we’ve had some great groups of Metro Nashville Public Schools students who volunteered at the Farm as part of their fall intercession and our Hands On Fall Break volunteer opportunities with the HON VolunTEEN Program. In addition to helping turn compost and harvest vegetables, the kids learned how compost works (it gets up to 160 degrees!), why drinks full of sugar aren’t good for our bodies, and how to choose healthier alternatives. A seventh grader named Ricky said he wished he could come to the Farm every day… maybe we have a future farmer in our midst!
VolunTEEN volunteers harvested all these sweet potatoes today!!
We got this awesome thank-you card from the West End Middle students!
If you’ve been by the Farm in a few weeks, you probably noticed our amazing new swings. We were very fortunate to have employees from Molex volunteered last month to make the swings and create some new compost bins. Their enthusiastic volunteerism will help make the farm more productive and enjoyable. The swings are made from beautiful cedar wood, and next spring we’ll have food vines growing up the trellised sides, adding to the food grown at the Farm. We have great hopes for those swings being covered in grapes, muscadines, kiwis, blackberries, raspberries, and all manner of other tasty treats.
Josh Corlew is Hands On Nashville’s Urban Agriculture Program Manager. He oversees the organization’s efforts to engage volunteers in service opportunities that empower them to gain gardening skills, learn about healthy eating choices, and help address our city’s food access issues. An AmeriCorps alumnus, Josh also has a secret past life as a Trekkie (he’s a big fan of the TV series Star Trek, for the uninitiated among us), and he has been known to participate in death-defying canoe trips.
Sponsored by the Cal Turner Family Foundation, the Turner Fellowship Program at Franklin Road Academy offers students an opportunity to serve in partnership with nonprofit organizations within the Nashville community. Deven Bhatia spent six weeks at Hands On Nashville this summer developing the school internship training curriculum, leading summer service projects, and planning Fall Break opportunities with HON’s youth program manager. A senior at FRA this year, Deven loves to play all kinds of sports including Ultimate Frisbee, spikeball, and basketball; read; listen to music; and plans to major in pre-medicine in college.
Deven volunteering at the Hands On Nashville Urban Farm – go, Deven!
It just got to me. This may be the last time I reflect on my indescribably awesome time at Hands On Nashville. Time definitely flies when you’re having fun. I don’t even know where to start. I guess a good place is to describe my last week with HON. This past week has still been busy for me as I have helped Colleen plan the Hands On Fall Break week. (Which is taking place this week through October 13, and volunteer slots are still available! To learn more and sign up, click here. Check out this video of youth volunteers’ work at a wheelchair ramp build project today.)
It was really fascinating to see exactly how volunteer events like this are created in the first place. I am usually terrible at making business calls on the phone, but working on this project helped me as I had to talk with several different people from several different organizations. It was a great week until Wednesday, my last day in the office. It felt weird clearing out my cubicle because I honestly felt like I had just gotten there. The whole Hands On Nashville staff was so fun to work with. They brought me popsicles on my last day. The entire staff was so optimistic and truly made me feel like a part of their family.
I still can’t believe the Turner Fellowship is over for me. These past six weeks have blown by me. However, I can definitely attest to two things. 1. I enjoyed every second of my experience at Hands On Nashville. 2. I think I’ve changed after this experience. I’ve changed into a young man who has a greater appreciation for the nonprofit field. Before this fellowship, I had no idea what occurred behind each and every volunteer opportunity, but now that I do, I have much greater respect for the employees who work at HON. Now I know for sure that I want to make nonprofit work a huge role in my life. I could see the vibrancy and the energy for helping people and creating a cleaner, more sustainable Nashville at both the office and the Urban Farm. When I told people that I was a summer intern at Hands On Nashville, they asked me what the nonprofit was and what it did. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next five years, everyone in the greater Nashville area knows who Hands On Nashville is and what Hands On Nashville stands for. If I move back to Nashville, I can definitely see myself volunteering at numerous Hands On Nashville events and introducing this organization to my family as well. I cannot thank the Hands On Nashville family enough for taking me in and making me feel like one of them. I wish them all the best of luck in their endeavors both in their occupations and their worldly enjoyments. Big shout-out to Colleen for keeping me on as an intern throughout the year, and dealing with my hectic schedule with workouts while still doing phenomenal work in the youth department.
I’ve now been sitting here for the last fifteen minutes thinking of an awesome last sentence to my blog, but unfortunately I’m kind of unsuccessful. Thank you to all my readers for putting up with my attempts to be humorous. I wish all of you the best and maybe who knows? You may see me writing another blog someday. Stay tuned and if you enjoyed this let me know: devenbhatia@gmail.com
(For the last time now…I think my computer is about to shut down because of all the tears it has absorbed.)
Dream Big,
Deven Bhatia
Long Live Life.
(The Hands On Nashville staff would like to thank Deven for his amazing work this summer, and wish him luck on all his future adventures!)
Young people are a big part of the volunteer movement here in Nashville. They bring a fresh perspective, endless energy, and a “why not?” attitude to many of Middle Tennessee’s most pressing issues. (To see some of this energy in action, take a look at these photos of this week’s Hands On Spring Break.)
In the spirit of this month’s Global Youth Service Day Presented by Starbucks, when Nashville youth will join millions of other teens around the world in a day of powerful volunteerism, we bring to you April’s Volunteer Leader feature: Tiannan Zhou, a sophomore at Hume Fogg.
Ask her how she came to serve as the HON Volunteer Leader at Backfield in Motion’s Saturday school, and the answer is quite simple: curiosity. “I had never volunteered before, and I really wanted to try something new,” she says. Plus, she’d heard from friends who had volunteered before that it was fun, so she decided to jump in.
Each Saturday, you can find Tiannan and other teen volunteers working on math and reading with the inner-city boys served by Backfield in Motion. While Tiannan has helped the boys with multiplication and addition, she’s been surprised to find that she’s learned some good things from them, too. “Attitude is often the most important thing. A smiling face and readiness to learn is what matters the most,” she says.
In the several months I’ve spent as a Fannie Battle intern, it’s been particularly important for me to introduce healthy physical activities that the kids can easily remember and replicate at home – because it’s shocking to learn how little time most spend being active.
Hui and the Fannie Battle kids play a game of "Human Knot."
With the rising popularity of addicting video games and the Internet, most youth just don’t think that going outside and exercising can be very enjoyable – or very important. Some of my youth don’t live near friends whom they can play with, and many have already-busy parents who just don’t have the time to greatly emphasize the importance of exercise.
Keeping those factors in mind, I decided to start the year with an activity that was fun and could be done on one’s own time – yoga. When I introduced the poses, however, I wasn’t surprised to receive a series of odd looks from my class.
“I can’t twist my arms far enough this Eagle pose!”
Yet, as we moved through cycles of Sun Salutations, lunged in Warrior poses and struggled to balance as Trees, we grew gigglier and sillier. (Check out these photos of the kids busting out some yoga moves!) At the end of the class, the youth voted to have a yoga show-and-tell; each of us would teach the rest of the class our favorite pose. When I left, I knew I wouldn’t have to ask them to keep exercising when they got home; they were already repeating the movements on their own. “This is fun! Can we do this again?” a girl asked.
Preparing for the day's activities!
When I returned this month, my class was again eager to learn and eager to exercise. While everyone last week had enjoyed yoga, this week’s workout – a mini bootcamp – appealed much more to the boys. We did push-ups and tricep push-ups, V-ups and crunches, and even hopped around the room in a series of jumping squats.
“Will muscles help me get girls?” a boy jokingly asked.
We all laughed, but I couldn’t help feeling that he had touched on something vital. When I went home from Fannie Battle this Friday, I waved goodbye to the same cries of, “Can we do this again? This was fun!” But this time, I left with a new idea in mind. So far, all of my efforts were intended to persuade youth that fitness was essential to healthy living. But perhaps, as this young man had mentioned, it could be linked to something more. Perhaps it was necessary to motivate my kids to exercise by pointing out how cardio workouts could help them run faster in soccer, or how doing push-ups would develop their biceps and help them pitch a ball faster in baseball.
Perhaps making fitness relevant to everyday activities could be more persuasive to youth than mere health and fitness alone – and in next month’s lesson, I hope to transform this young boy’s words into inspiration.
Hui Cheng, a senior at Martin Luther King Academic Magnet School, is one of 12 HON Youth Volunteer Corps Interns, serving in the inaugural 2011-2012 class. Each month, she plans and leads a fitness and nutrition focused activity that engages the children served by the Fannie Battle Day Home For Children after-school program. Hands On Nashville is now accepting applications for the 2012-13 YVC Internship program. Read more and download an application.
Guest post by Melissa Spradlin, Executive Director of Book’em –
[For the past two months, Nashville-area students from 20 elementary, middle and high schools have worked hard to collect books to be donated to Book'em. The grand total came in at an astonishing 20,421 books. The initiative, in its second year and coordinated by Hands On Nashville’s VolunTEEN Program, culminated this weekend when 75 students, teachers, and parents from the participating schools gathered to sort through the books and prepare them for donating. Book'em will then ensure that the books get into the hands of children and teens from low-income families, most of whom have no books of their own. Melissa Spradlin, executive director of Book'em, explains the significance of the book drive…]
Think back to your childhood and some of the fabulous books you owned. How did they affect you? How might you feel if you did not have those great memories? What if you had never read Brown Bear, Brown Bear; The Cat in the Hat; The Secret Garden; To Kill a Mockingbird; The Hunger Games; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; or whatever your favorite titles were?
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Thanks to 20 public and private schools in the Nashville area, thousands of children and teens in Davidson County will have the chance to own and read wonderful books. On Saturday, I had the privilege of working with some of Nashville’s best volunteers of all ages from local schools, Junior League of Nashville, Hands On Nashville, and Book’em. They sorted and counted nearly 20,000 books that morning. Do you know what 20,000 books looks like? Believe me, it’s a lot of books to handle in one morning! Throughout the day, I heard lots of comments about many of the books and people’s great memories of reading of them.
Unfortunately, many of our own economically disadvantaged youth here in the Nashville area do not have books of their own to cherish and read as often as they want. If you want to help change that, like these students and schools did, please check out the Book’em website at www.bookem-kids.org to learn more about how you can help.
Music is one of the most beautiful forms of art and communication we have. It is something that can be shared between friends, loved ones, or even teacher and student. The beautiful thing is that it can connect two very different types of people together. I have formed a unique and close bond to these children I teach at Salvation Army. They have brightened my Tuesday afternoons countless times, without even one dull moment!
Hume Fogg sophomore Jenny Sai at Salvation Army's after-school program.
It has been my goal for these kids to realize that they can express themselves in a whole new way. I always encourage the notion that there is no right way to say how you feel. One way I helped them do this was by analyzing how artists communicate with audiences through their lyrics. We listened to pop songs such as Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and Justin Bieber’s “Baby.” They had so much fun discussing what they thought each artist was saying. We even had an impromptu game of “freeze dance” where I attempted to dance, but only managed to embarrass myself and have them laugh at me.
The kids with their rainmakers! (Check out the video below to see them in action.)
I also wanted them to experience all ends of the musical spectrum, so of course, they had to be exposed to classical music. We listened to excerpts from Glazunov’s Seasons: Autumn and En Bateau by Debussy. Both of these compositions contain grand imagery. I had them draw a picture of the scene they imagined in their head when I played these songs. I ended with themed music and showed them how music could make a movie scary. They had to draw a picture of that too. I saw many monsters and knives and blood. It was a great breakthrough for me seeing how integrated the kids could get with the music.
Other projects I have done with them have involved making homemade instruments. I hoped that with the actual making of the instrument, they would have a more intimate idea of where these instruments came from and how they were made. One lesson I did was musical instruments of antiquity where the kids made Greek panpipes. We also made rainmakers one day. By the end, my students all appreciated the materials we usually take for granted and had a bigger view of where instruments evolved. Not only were they exposed to a variety of cultures, they also learned that music tied people together even in the earliest of times.
Jenny Sai, a sophomore at Hume Fogg High School, is one of 12 HON Youth Volunteer Corps Interns, serving in the inaugural 2011-2012 class. Each month, she plans and leads an arts- and music-focused activity that engages the children served by the Salvation Army’s after-school program.
We’ve all experienced those times when we have been reluctant to try something new, for fear of straying from the comforts of familiarity. Once getting past the initial shock of it all, we often find that it was completely painless and maybe even enjoyable. In my last lesson at Bethlehem Centers of Nashville, the middle school students I work with had quite a similar experience, but with hummus and ultimate Frisbee. These may seem like two unrelated topics, but they went along with the fitness and nutrition activity I conducted this month.
An early goal of mine was to encourage these students to make healthier choices and emphasize that it doesn’t have to be about making drastic lifestyle changes. There are many simple measures we can take to maintain a healthier lifestyle. To learn some key nutrition facts we made models of the Food Plate diagram and solved Nutrition Label puzzles. Now my hope is to expose the students to fitness games and healthy food options that they are not normally accustomed to in their daily lives.
Ultimate Frisbee was familiar to some, but for others it was completely foreign. After practicing our throws and doing a couple of warm-up activities, we got to the best part. These students thrive in active competition.
Students playing ultimate Frisbee at the Bethlehem Center.
At first, while still getting the hang of it, they were a little apprehensive. They saw the similarities to football and wanted to resort back to their comfort zone. We kept playing anyways and soon they didn’t want to stop. However, eventually we had to move on to our snack. I brought them carrots and reduced fat crackers to dip in some tasty hummus. They were very resistant to hummus because it seemed so strange. I explained the ingredients and where it comes from, but still no one wanted to be the first to try it. In the end, everyone worked up the courage to have a taste, and the general consensus was that it was not as bad as they were expecting. Few admitted to really liking it, but the important thing is that they all tried it. This has been a truly rewarding experience, and I’ve greatly enjoyed working with these students and the people at Bethlehem Centers.
Shanna Rucker is a senior at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School. Her YVC Internship focus is on Fitness & Nutrition at Bethlehem Centers of Nashville, a family resource center serving infants, children, teens, adults, and seniors primarily in the North Nashville community.
Allyson and the kids learned how to make guacamole one evening. YUM.
My experience teaching the children at Edgehill Community Center has been beyond rewarding. As I pulled into the parking lot last Friday for my monthly lesson, the kids rushed to the window and started cheering at my arrival. I will keep that precious moment forever in my memory; it made me feel like I was having as big of an impact on their lives as they were on mine.
I entered the room to find past crafts of elephant masks and decorated aprons on the walls. I always start my lesson with a brief summary of everything I have taught them so far. After a quick quiz, I introduced the December lesson: Japanese culture. In just a short hour, the kids were immersed into The Land of the Rising Sun. They all tried sushi for the first time. Some of the kids made faces when they tried it, but some of them fell in love with it. When just a few kids are able to open their minds to try something new, I know my lesson is a success.
The Edgehill kids proudly displayed their newly-constructed Elephant Masks in a recent gathering.
I also taught them how to make an origami swan, penguin, and Christmas tree for them to put on their tree at home because it is very common in Japan to use origami as ornaments. After much trial and error, the kids created something very special that had significance to them. Then, the kids decorated karate headbands before a brief fitness lesson where Japanese numbers were incorporated into a game.
The kids most-recently learned about Japanese culture. They tried sushi for the first time and applied some new fitness skills.
By comparing cultural customs, the kids find all the different countries I teach fascinating. They are starting to recognize the origin of certain American customs, and I truly believe this will be a stepping stone towards furthering their ambitions and goals for their lives ahead.
Allyson Burgess, a senior at Davidson Academy, is one of 12 HON Youth Volunteer Corps Interns, serving in the inaugural 2011-2012 class. These remarkable leaders are currently working with local nonprofits to engage young Nashvillians in educational and skill-building experiences in the arts, fitness/nutrition, and gardening/food security. Allyson leads arts/health projects at Edgehill Community Center one Friday a month.
To volunteer with these youth-led projects, visit the VolunTEEN Opportunity Calendar (volunteers must be 11 to 18). Learn more about HON’s VolunTEEN Program here.
Most volunteerism starts from a small seed of hope and compassionate care. And from tiny seeds, abundant gardens can bloom. The Baptist Healing Trust knows that young people who volunteer serve as an inspiration to others, and can cause a great ripple effect in communities. The Mary Catherine Strobel Volunteer Awards’ longest-serving award sponsor of nine years, Baptist Healing Trust once again will honor youth volunteers at the 2013 awards luncheon.
