COD day/first day of IP

Yesterday we the start of our first official week since training ended, and my week started with my first COD day, which stands for Community Outreach and Development. Basically it's the day that a smaller group of us made up of members from both houses go to the AmeriCorps office and work on planning projects and events. There will be some variety to what we do it seems like, but I'm not exactly sure what that will look like yet since it seems like there are many different directions we could take with that day based on what we want to do as a group. We're split into 3 COD days based on when our IPs meet and my day is responsible for planning an event called Canal Clean-Up where we organized volunteers to clean up the canal in Bourne. That's not until April though so we have a lot of time before then to work on smaller projects. One aspect of COD day is doing puppet shows for kids, which we got trained to do last month, so yesterday we did a fire safety puppet show to a preschool class. It was pretty fun, and the kids were adorable.

Then today was the first day of my IP, which as I said before is my Individual Placement, which is basically an internship that I'll go to twice a week with the Cape Cod National Seashore Planning Department. I got a little bit of a better idea today of what I'll be doing there, which was good. A big part of what I'll be doing seems to be working on their Climate Friendly Parks initiative, which includes keeping records of the parks emissions for their carbon emissions inventory to track whether they are progressing towards their goals of becoming greener. I'm also going to be part of something called Green Team, and I'm not exactly sure yet what that means but I have a Green Team meeting tomorrow morning so I guess I'll find out. Other things I'll be working on throughout the year are helping plan events such as the annual Highlands Fest in the summer, writing for their newsletter, and helping with their new pond assessment project. I think it will be a great year, I'm really excited to start getting into the routine of things there and I think I'm going to learn a lot of great things.

For my first day, my service partner Lauren just showed me my work space, gave me a tour of the building and introduced me to a bunch of the people who work there, who I'm sure I'm not going to remember their names because there were so many of them that I met in a short period of time lol. Lauren also showed me hwo to access important information on the computers and gave me some time to read over some of the information I had on hand, part of which was a letter from the girl who had my placement last year which was nice because she outlined some of the main duties and gave some tips about things I could work on. I documented many parts of this day so I could remember my first day, so here's a picture of my work space. :)

We also went to a nursery to check out the plants that we will be using for a group project with the rest of the AmeriCorps members on Monday, and then toured some of the National Seashore land in the area. Here are some pictures from that.

A beautiful pond we went to when Lauren was showing me some of the property. This picture doesn't do it justice.

A beach where we went to check on some beach grass planting that AmeriCorps did last year.

 Highlands Light, where AmeriCorps will be doing a group project on Monday, planting bushes to keep people away from the edge of the cliff which is eroding.

 Well, I guess that's it for now, it's getting late and I'm kinda tired. I hope you enjoyed the pics!