The bench project (a fost n-a fost)

7.13.08

"It was, no it wasn’t." That about sums up our bench project in the park. Quick recap, I had a project development volunteer group. Im going to loosely say I had a group because after the first 3 weeks it was staggered attendance and productivity.

The group of high school students, went through some brain storming ideas on things that they would like to see their community have. From there we did a little critical thinking and then selected a project. From there we wrote a project proposal, and with this we could develop into a request for money from either the mayor’s office, the community itself, high school students, and even local businesses.

I did not want to write a grant for this project because I am trying to show or maybe learn myself how to get projects in this country done without the needs of outside funding. Long story short, we fell short on asking the community, mayors office and the high school students. We were in the process of developing a marketing plan asking for money from a local business in exchange for some marketing and publicity for them which we could provide when we hit a brick wall then the project magically was completed.

The brick wall was the lack of enthusiasm on the project. It is summer, the volunteers had left or were working. I tried to call a meeting and only 2 showed up. About 3 days after meeting I noticed the benches were being repaired by some workers. I asked around, found out the organization in charge of making the park beautiful got wind of our desire to do this project and thought it was a good idea. So they just went a head and did it!

This is a huge step given its been nearly 20 years since these benches have been usable and now they are painted and repaired completely. Sure it would have been great to say, we did this ourselves, raised the money and did the repairs with our own hands like we had planned but I am just as happy with this result. Some adults who knew about our desire to get this project done were angry that this other organization did the repairs because it was “our” project. I think they need to look at the big picture… we have new benches :).