CAPs Friday 5/2/10

Friday, 5 February 2010 | posted by Matt_BC
CAPs (Community Action Programmes), Guildford 2009, Youth work

Project Mosaic

Hello everyone!  It’s GCM Sofia here.
 
Back at home in Ottawa, I started a small CAP called Project Mosaic with members of Language Club, a club at my high school Lisgar, which promoted multiculturalism and diversity.

In Canada, there are so many different cultures, especially in downtown, where one can find an extraordinary immigrant population.  So we decided to create a project to teach elementary school children at the local community center Jack Purcell about different cultures around the world through various art, culinary, craft, and anything-else-fun activities. The point is that the exposure to all these cool cultures from a young age will help integration in the future. Plus, they can pass on their knowledge to their parents!

The volunteers we get are all from our high school and the sessions are all afterschool. This project started at the end of the 2009 school year. We basically worked out all the administrative things –paperwork, setting up time slots, measuring interest, etc. With the new school year, Mosaic is off to a fabulous start.

Unfortunately, I had to leave for university (and am now in Boston), so I couldn’t see much of the progress. But the project is in capable hands –the current co-presidents of Language Club Megumi Mori and Cornelia Tang!

So without much further ado, here’s Megumi and Cornelia with the latest updates:

Hello everyone! Since the start of the October 2009, Mosaic has been running every Tuesday afternoon from 4pm to 5pm, with the exception of the December holidays and the January exam days. The new thing at Jack Purcell this year is that the children are divided into seniors (Grades 4, 5, and 6) and juniors (Grades 1, 2, 3), and we alternate between the seniors and juniors every week. Usually we carry out the same activity for both groups (we don’t want to be biased), but we always tailor our program so that the information presented to the children is always clear and understandable to them.

In the past few months we’ve done many different activities, most of which are crafts with rich, interesting cultural background. With some of the small crafts, even the volunteers can learn cool stories that they’ve never heard of before behind the everyday stuff that we see all the time! And of course with the activities, everybody has fun. Here are some pictures from a selection of activities of the past few months:

Chinese fan-making (October), featuring volunteers Alice Ye and Fatema Begum
  

Chinese legend Journey to the West storytelling & colouring (October)
 

Bubble-tea-making (November)
 

Snowflake crafts (December/Christmas): Volunteers with children


Left to right: Fatema Begum, Alice Ye, Megumi Mori


Left to right: Alice Ye, participating senior, Feven Mulugata, Fatema Begum

And right now in February, in preparation for the Chinese New Year on Feb. 14, we’re making simple Chinese lanterns and teaching the children about the celebration in China. More of that will come up in the February updates.

 
Another notable thing was that in November, we met with three representatives from the American Embassy. With them we discussed the prospects of our projects, mainly aspects such as expanding our team, increasing publicity, etc. The good news is that the American Embassy is willing to support us in any way possible; they are willing to give us some funds and assist with our activities, for example by helping us find guest speakers or performers on our request. As of now our activities haven’t gone grand enough to require their help, but we’ll be in touch with them very soon and conjuring up some really cool activities.

Regarding the team of volunteers, we’re still trying to get more people involved so that we can introduce organized, patterned weekly shifts. We’re steadily making progress; just recently there were several new volunteers that joined our team. We’re also training the candidates for next year’s co-presidents – Fatema Begum and Feven Mulugata, since we’re going off to university ourselves in June. We’re slowly shifting the planning of activities to the candidates, so that Mosaic will keep spanning just as it does now, when it’s our turn to leave.

We’re also planning on making a survey for the parents, so that we can assess our influence.

In general, Mosaic is moving along quite steadily. We’ll keep providing updates and let everyone know what we’re up to. Keep your eyes out for our little logo!