Kerra Wait, Final Blog (#8)

Hello Again,

For the final time of my 2011 Summer Internship I am writing my final blog. I cannot really say I am going to miss blogging because I always have problems with posting my blog! However I will miss the people I have been working with and also doing my work. This was my first internship I have ever taken and I think it was a great choice and opportunity that I took. When I first started I was very nervous because I would be working with people I did not know and would be doing things that I was not used to. I quickly learned that in order to grow as a person you have to go out and try new things and meet new people, and I came to love it. With my first day of working in my internship I was overwhelmed with meeting new people and gave a list of what I all needed to do. I was very scared! The day after getting a list of things to do, I was leaving to Craig, Colorado for State High School Finals Rodeo and I was in a panic about getting my work done while I was gone. Within a couple days I soon learned how to multi-task with several phones and a laptop. First on my list was to contact all of the Entrepreneurship Fair award winners, and tell them about the award ceremony. Boy was this a challenge- At the fair, each project was signed in. When they signed in they were to put down a phone number that we could contact them at, their actually address and an e-mail we could also send information to if they had one. Well, most of the kids put down their projects made up phone number, address and e-mail. Which left me no way to contact the winners unless I knew them or their parents. However I did some detective work and was able to contact every award winner!

Also while having a list to do for the Baca County Economic Development I also was planning a Connecting Kids to Community Leadership Day with Megan England. I was thinking to myself everyday how am I going to be able to get all of this done! But somehow I did! Everything finally started to fall into place and I was excited about all of the great plans my internship held in my future. It seemed to work out that Megan and I had the same mind set and goals for our Leadership Day. It even worked out that the day before our big Leadership day I was going to Pueblo to the orthodontist and I could pick up all of the supplies and snacks so no special trip was needed. Finally the day arrived and it was a blast! I am looking forward to making this a county wide youth leadership day and getting more youth involved each year.

My next project I was working on my internship was with the Baca County Economic Development. The BCED is working on trying to find a way that we could get some money to fund projects. Several years ago they had came up with an idea of having a county tax of 1%. We were still interested in doing this, so we needed to take some steps to get this process going. Members of the BCED did some research and found out that we had a lot of work to do go get this passed. We finally decided that we would need to do some promoting of our economic development and what our goals are for the county. With that in mind, we thought that it would be a good idea to try to make it to all of the city council meetings and inform them of what we do and what our plans are.
While working on attending the city council meetings I was also involved in working on the Fresh Start Program. With the Fresh Start Program we are trying to get people to clean up their empty lots and build on it. We are trying to show them how they could make money with their lots they are not using and how it could benefit other people in the area. This was quite an experience driving around the towns and writing down the addresses because I learned that in Baca County, we do not really have a set way we have our addresses. So pictures became very important to finding the owner and correct address.

My entire internship was a great experience and I cannot wait until I can get another opportunity to apply again. I feel that I have done my county good with only my few months of work and I want to do more! I hope everybody has a great rest of the year!

-Kerra Wait