First Week

After today, I will have completed my first week at Dysart Community Center(DCC). For my first week of my internship, my focus was on observing what goes on during a normal day at DCC. I also learned a bit about the history of DCC and its role in the city of El Mirage.

First, I would like to provide some information about DCC, which I feel I left out of my last post.  DCC is a nonprofit located in old town El Mirage. Named after what was then the nearest road, it was founded 1962 to provide health and human services to the residents of El Mirage, who were mostly agricultural migrant workers. It is a very small nonprofit, with a full time staff of about 4 people, with a part time staff of 2. Despite its smallness, DCC provides a wide range of services to the community of El Mirage, such as but not limited to ESL courses, after school programs, GED courses, and financial coaching.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, I intern from 10 to 2 at DCC. On both those days this week, I followed Mike Cassidy, the executive director of DCC. I listened to and took notes on his "state of union", which briefly summarized the current state of DCC as well his responsibilities as executive director of DCC. I followed him around and sat in on his meetings. I also followed Lord Garcillano, DCC's GED instructor, to a meeting and presentation DCC held for West Side Head Start. The meeting focused on introducing people to the financial coaching DCC offers.  As a significant portion of the people who the presentation addressed spoke Spanish better than English, Susie Ratley, DCC's Adult Education Director, was present to speak in Spanish.

Both Lord and Mike have responsibilities outside what their job titles suggest. They run DCC's Teens Arts and Action Program, which provides artistic resources to local teens. They both also handle applying for grants to fund DCC's programs as well as other fundraising.

On Wednesdays, I interned from 12 to 4 at DCC. This past Wednesday, I worked with Lord to find grants to help fund the GED program. We used grants search engines such as grantsalert.com and fundsnetservices.com, to find potential grants. As Lord is in charge of the GED program, we focused on finding grants which could fund the GED program. I spent about 3 hours searching for grants and found about 10 potential sources of funding.  Despite the majority of the GED program participants being adults, several of the grants I found to be promising were aimed towards helping low income youth. The next most common source of grants were those that sought to help human services nonprofits, which makes sense considering that the focus of the GED program is to provide adults with a degree that can help stabilize their income.  After helping Lord search for grants, I reviewed what grants were the most promising. He then stated he wanted me to write a rough draft of a grant proposal.

On Thursday, I came from 10 to 11:30 and 6 to 8. I helped out with the GED programs this day, tutoring in math. The ages of the adults I helped ranged from teenage to middle aged.

Overall, it was a promising first week. I observed several areas of which my research covered, such as the relationship between DCC and the government and other nonprofits, the political advocacy DCC engages in and how DCC operates its programs. Furthermore, its rewarding to work with an organization that has such a direct contact with the community it serves and is so incredibly dedicated to helping and empowering the community.