Our Proposal

We have been working on an official proposal this week. We made some big decisions in order narrow down our ideas and have one specific plan.

After researching Greenville County, we decided to focus our attention on Mauldin Elementary schools. The area is mostly made up of middle class people which is what we decided is best since we would need to test out the program with a fairly organized community before converting the program for a less developed area.

For our program, we want to organize a monthly field day.

The children would participate in all types of games and activities that the parents would be running. Some of the examples of the games we were thinking about are

• three-legged race
• egg race
• water balloon toss
• tug-of-war

Also we were thinking about some more organized sports like basketball or soccer. The games would change depending on the season, for example, you wouldn't want to have a water balloon toss in winter.

At first Strong Communities would be organizing the field day but the goal of the program is for the program to be community-run. After the first couple months, hopefully, the communities would be able to take over the organization.

Meeting One

We had our first meeting this week to discuss what we think about the project with the company Strong Design.

We had many ideas from the start of the meeting so most of the time was spent comparing ideas and figuring out how we wanted to approach the project. Some of the broad ideas suggested were:

• Athletics
• Transportation
• A pamphlet/newsletter
• Parent and child interaction

We decided that we all like the idea of a pamphlet or newsletter to keep the parents and children involved with all the activities that are going on in the community. We think it should be sent to the house and not just handed out at school so it will definitely make it to the parents and everyone will have equal opportunity to participate.

We also like the idea of an athletic program. We were thinking about something like a soccer team that everyone could participate in and enjoy. We were thinking about having different communities form different teams so there would be a fun competition between the kids; give them something to play for.

We decided that we needed to run some of our ideas by the director of Strong Communities before making any specific decisions so we gave the job of sending an email to Mr. Charles to one of our team members. Hopefully after we hear from him we will be able to make some more specific decisions.