TOW Drew Talks About Chicago: Part 1

It’s been a helluva long time, hasn’t it? I honestly have no idea where to begin. SOOOO much has happened between May/June until now, and I doubt that a single entry is going to give these past six months any justice. We’ll see where this goes…

By the time I left Ann Arbor for good, I still had no idea where I was going to be come September. Honestly, I didn’t even start making a serious effort in figuring out my plans until late July (then again, NSLC took up literally my whole being from July to August.) After sending out my applications and resume, I ended up getting two serious project offers: a Red Cross development project in Seattle and a conference organizer/clinic volunteer position in Chicago. The decision was absolutely tough for me; as many of you know, I’ve wanted to go West since the beginning of college. However, the job position in Chicago seemed to be exactly what I was looking for; it seemed more in line with my background and offered more of a compatible job experience. It literally took me going to Mass with my Father one night to help me decide that I would move to Chicago.

To put this more into perspective, I left California and NSLC, 08/10/2007. I accepted my offer in Chicago 08/17/2007, and I started looking for apartments around 08/28/2007. Needless to say, August was an extremely whirlwind month for me. I didn’t have much time to really think about anything else except moving my things from one box to another and shuttling myself to Chicago.

I moved to Chicago on 09/04/2007. Because I didn’t have much time between accepting the project offer and my start date, I lived with two of my dad’s distant relatives in Evanston for two weeks. The search for a permanent place to stay did not last long though as these said relatives helped me secure a cheap 3-bedroom apartment in the Northwest of the city. Immediately after, I found two other people from Americorps to take the other two bedrooms.

Here's a picture of my place:

This is the front porch. My two roommates and I are at the top of the steps.

I should probably explain what I do. To do that, I’m going to do this in bullet form, with the bullets being the different agencies to whom I answer:

- Chicago Health Corps: This is the agency that is linked with Americorps and affiliates itself with many different health organizations throughout the city. The members work for these said organizations, and in turn we organize city-wide health service projects in addition to our work.

- IMCHC = Illinois Maternal and Child Health Coalition: This is the non-profit organization I work for. Like the name suggests, the org’s focus is advocating for health issues concerning women, children and the family. There are four projects within IMCHC, two of which I’m currently working for: the Illinois Coalition for School Health Centers (my official Americorps project) and Covering Kids and Families (a project I picked up on the side in a smaller context.)

- ICSHC = Illinois Coalition for School Health Centers: This is the project within the agency that I’m involved with. Specifically, IMCHC does advocacy work for the maintenance and expansion of school health centers throughout Illinois. My main project for the year is to help organize an annual conference dedicated to this advocacy in Springfield. This involves a lot of letter-writing, excel-sheet operating, mail-merging and labeling, committee meeting and countless other things I’m probably forgetting.

- Orr Health Center: This is the school health center I work at for three days of the week. Part of my Americorps job description requires me to get field experience in the health center. Here, I have two main purposes: 1) I act as the front desk guy, putting together charts and scheduling appointments for the students, and 2) I do nutrition education programming for the kids every week or two.

Yeah… seems confusing, eh? Trust me. It took me a helluva long time to figure it out myself.

All in all though, I’m generally enjoying Chicago. While it isn’t exactly the West Coast, I feel like Chicago’s definitely giving me everything that I need right now. I’m definitely enjoying work so far, and there’s a lot to do so far. I’m also really liking my roommates so far and it’s really nice to have a bunch of UMich people at arms length too. However, I’m gonna cut it off here right now; otherwise this entry is going to get way too long. Stay tuned until I go into the fun, non-work related stuff. And yes, that does mean I’ll talk about my love life (or lack thereof.) That’ll have you coming back, no? ;-)