27,000 Words! That's right -- that and about 500 hours. OY!
No, it's not my latest novel ... though it feels like I should be receiving some sort of doctorate degree. The image represents all of the work that's gone into Portola Family Connections' Anchor Institution Community Plan. It's part of San Francisco's Department of Children, Family, and Youth's Anchor Institution Initiative.
As the planning consutltant for the project, I've been working on this since last December --1) Developing a framework and timeline for implementing the planning process; 2) Helping to identify key groups of stakeholders to participate in the process; 3) Working with the Planning Team to draft community needs surveys tailored to each group of participants and analyzing the results; 4) Working with the Planning Team to follow-up on the survey results (we collected almost 500 surveys) with targeted focus groups and meetings; 5) Analyzing the results of the surveys and focus groups to prioritize community needs; 6) Working with Family Connections staff and Board to conduct an organizational assessment, including a staff survey and conducting two focus groups to help address the infrastructural needs for supporting the Anchor Institution Initiative; 7) Drafting the Anchor Institution Community Plan with timeline and action steps.
So for those of you who wonder what I'm doing when I'm not working on my installations or international projects, now you know.
I actually love doing this work; however, I will say this final part of the Anchor Institution process -- tabulating and analyzing the data and developing a community plan based on the results -- has been quite mind altering at times. BUT, the bonus is that when I need to take a break, my thoughts lead me to wacky Web searches on things that I've been wanting to find for years. This weekend, total scores!!!
RUFUS AND CHAKA KHAN:
I've been looking for a download of Rufus and Chaka Khan's song Quandary from the album Camouflage for years. God Bless YouTube! I got this album in the early eighties when it came out and loved this song! Like so much of my music from that era, purchased on casette tapes, it's all disappeared.
SKYY
How amazing is this album cover?!!! WOW! More amazing is that I finally remembered the name of this band that I also loved and played incessantly. I actually subjected my Dad to 6 hours of Skyy while we drove from Billings to Minot North Dakota. I told Eliza this and her response was "Poor Kemp!!!" Indeed! However, I asked him if he could send me a hint from heaven to remember the name of the band, and he did -- right after I asked, the words "call me" (my favorite song by Skyy) strongly came to mind and that's what led me to finally finding my old love. Even in the after-life, my Dad's wacky sense of humor is fully intact.
PLANET PURPLE
Now this might be the best find of the weekend. For years, I would ask people if they remembered the Purple Planet from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. My recollection was that this was the coolest part of the show, which I wasn't that much a fan -- but the Purple Planet was way worth sitting through all of the creepy characters from the Land of Make-Believe. One person said they vaguely remembered this. I was beginning to think that I'd completely made the whole thing up. But NO! Thanks to Google, I know I'm not crazy (at least on this). It really did exist!
