On the Eighth Friday of First Book Fun...

got ready to go. Yep, I did, at some points I think I realize that aside from the grant proposals that I'm doing and of course all the letters that I'm sending off to foundation, I've more or less stopped learning things. Which in part is probably my own fault for not asking enough questions.
Anyhow, we did have some impressive meetings with Kyle Zimmer and some top secret functional strategic meetings that most everyone from every department went to. I've realized from these meetings that your social network is probably the most important thing, especially if you were looking for money from corporations. The social implications of this I'm hesitant to expand on here but I do have some personal ideas.
From my talks with Kyle, I get the idea that she's a lady who really knows her stuff and is someone who you'd call charismatic. I can certainly see how people would willingly work towards the ideals that she has. It really is quite impressive and somehow makes me wish I could be half as charismatic as her and maybe our CAB would be that much more effective.
Haywood has also arrived and I'm surprised to learn that he will be with the strategic alliances team as originally it seems he was suppose to be working on the individual and foundation donation research. However, since I have quite a bit of experience and probably due to timing, things seem to work out this way. He seems to have a great grasp in the business world and I'm definitely hoping he will join our campus advisory board in the near future.
So before I head off I will have to update this blog some more with all the fun things that I've been doing in DC and of course, visit all the Smithsonian museums that I have not visited yet.

It is amazingly awesome to be in DC on the fourth of July, America's Independence day

On the Seventh Friday of First Book Fun...

So this post was actually posted by First Book's blog yesterday and I'm just re-posting it here for my Friday entry :)

I am one of three co-chairs who head up the campus advisory board (CAB) at the University of Pennsylvania. Let me tell you that being at the helms of a campus advisory board is not an easy thing to do and the best comparison I can come up with is that it is like being a taxi driver. Henceforth I shall refer to myself as a CAB driver and boy am I glad that I'm not the only driver. Sometimes there are so many obstacles in our path like getting tutoring groups on our campus to board our CAB and become a recipient group. Other times like when midterms rolled around our CAB stopped rolling for awhile and it took a few pushes to get it moving again. Going through the potholes and detours, we are so glad to have an awesome CAB mechanic, Nicole Thompson, Campus Advisory Board Manager at First Book's headquarters who can always help us with tune ups and get us on the road again. Despite the obstacles, it is a great path to be on. During the past year, we have had so much great experiences learning to drive the CAB in our community and have made so many great connections to various organizations on campus and helped to add to many organizations brand new books to their events and even held events of our own! At the heart of West Philadelphia, we know there are many kids in need and hope to improve our CAB towards delivering more books these kids.
It may not always be a smooth ride, but I, along with my fellow CAB drivers will go down the First Book path wherever it lead us to make possible the delivery of books for kids in need.

On the Sixth Friday of First Book Fun...

Many things happened. For one, we have our new development coordinator now and she's just awesome! I love her because she's so enthusiastic and we've been able to get many things done. For one, a new project on getting grants for one of our First Book National Book Bank distribution that invovles a Native American author. I actually got to read the whole book after I went on an errand to buy it from the corner Walden Books store and it was a pretty funny book. No wonder the author received many awards. It is a very good coming of age book to inspire American Indian teenagers. Thus, we've been working pretty hard looking at grants available and strategizing on ways to raise funds to make this distribution totally free for recipient groups, in other words, searching for money to cover the shipping costs. In addition I also looked into how to write grants and letters of inquiry and such and am actually learning a lot.

On other fronts, we heard back from some of our celebrities for the inquiries that we sent out for the WBGYH campaign and I just have to communicate in a clearer way of deadlines on when we need their info by. So altogether, this has been a good week.

On the Fifth Friday of First Book Fun...

It is fourth of July weekend and First Book has actually taken the day off as an organization. Thus, we're left to our own devices to find fun in a meaningful way. This has been somewhat of a slow week as my supervisor has taken the week off to see relatives and go to her high school reunion in Florida. The rest of the office seem to be in a holiday mode too as there weren't too many people around. Thus, we actually didn't have a development department meeting or any other meetings for that matter. However, we did hire a new development coordinator and I'm excited that she will be starting work next week so that we have more people in our department.

From last week's social media and blog meeting, I did get assigned to do several blogs for First Book's official blog and have been researching on relevant blogs that might want to help us to spread the word about WBGYH. The one other major change that we saw with WBGYH was that our voting was pushed back from July 15th to the end of July and beginning of September. Some of this due to the timing issues in relation with Michael Jackson's death and vacationing dates. Anyhow, I guess I will off to do some more work on researching blogs and other social media sites.

My aspirations for this blog

So yours truly has multiple blogs and all the previous entries in this one just got moved over to the blog here:
http://lindaxiaokang.wordpress.com
It's mostly pictures from my travels throughout China and Europe

This blog will now chronicle my musings, struggles and triumphs with college, politics, philosophy, research among other things and hopefully a bit more academic.

For my other official blogs:
Charity Grows
http://charitygrows.wordpress.com
This one was made because I am currently working with a variety of non-profits and trying to keep up with the news etc for non-profits based in the United States.

Bible Angels
http://fridaybibleangels.blogspot.com
This one is a shared blog that I started with several of my friends who have really encouraged each other in our Christian faith and we hope to keep going even after graduating.

The extremely personal blog, I rather keep that one to myself, but if you're really curious, ask me about it.

Fourth of July weekend in DC

It is amazingly awesome to be in DC on the fourth of July, America's Independence day.

I do have to tell a joke:
So an American business man is talking with his business partner in Great Britain and conference call is about to end, so the British partner says, "Why don't we continue this tomorrow?" the American partner says "Tomorrow we're closed over here because it is independence day" and the British partner goes "Oh, it's Thanksgiving."

Anyhow, I have a weird sense of humor. Continuing on to what I did for the weekend.

So first I checked out the Folk Festival at the National Mall that is put on by Smithsonian every summer and it was a lot of fun. It was not anything huge but I at least got to learn some Welsh dances since this year one of their themes is the Isle of Wales, where I have actually been to :)

Anyhow, here are the pictures:


This is the Folk Life festival right in front of the Smithsonian castle


I went into the castle and they displayed the scene from Night at the Museum, Battle at the Smithsonian. Which I still have not seen yet, but definitely will, hopefully at one of the Smithsonian IMAX theaters.

I volunteered for the Independence day parade and got to be one of these balloon holders.

This is actually our balloon, I'm the person with the pink dress


This when we were getting ready with the balloons, we were the last one to go so we got bored

The Artomatic exhibitions

What is Artomatic you ask? It is basically an art exhibition hall located at the Navy Yard metro station stop on the green line. It exhibitis for about a month, it was the month of July and I went on the last few days. My achievement was that I saw every floor and there were around ten floors, so it was awesome.

Here are some photos that turned out well.

More info about Artomatic
http://www.artomatic.org/about/whatis


The views were great from the building:


I like the bunny cart in this one and notice the godzilla with McDonald take out bag

Series of peeps:

This one is ofthe Beijing Olympics







Parody of Mary Poppins


A play on Wall-E