<<<Link to vengage poster that I will be spreading around Durango for the project.
Blog 3 (May 17th) So, the Humane Society volunteering didn't work out because they aren't letting people volunteer for them due to COVID. I decided that I would sell my clothes online and volunteer at the recreation center and the gymnastics place to make up for my work. Once I raise enough money doing that I'm going to give it to the Humane Society like my original plan. This way, I can contribute the same ideas I had for the Humane Society but also help out other places in need too. I've already emailed the worker for the gymnastics place and hopefully he emails back to let me know I can help out there to do something good. I have also put up clothes online that I'm selling on the website Curtsy. Curtsy is an online thrift store where you can sell and buy many clothes, shoes, accessories, and more. During this experience, I will be able to learn a lot about business too. It will help me understand the way different businesses work and operate during COVID. Next steps for this week are going to be all about working and volunteering to help the community. I got a lot of help from my mom for this issue that I was running into on the first paragraph. She helped me organize and email the people who run the shelter and other places I'm volunteering.
Blog 2 (May 13th) Last week went really good. I emailed the La Plata Humane Society and I organized a fundraiser event to raise money for them. It was really hard to get the fundraiser organized because it was really complicated how I'm going to set it up and where and what day and time. I emailed the Humane Society to get some help and it really helped me get everything organized. Three wins I got through this project is being able to create some flyers for a fundraising event and emailing the Humane Society so they can help me organize everything for the event. I'm wondering what types of baked goods i'm going to sell and what I'm going to do. Like either buy some desserts or home make them.
Blog 1 (April 20th) My process for developing my 20% project is first creating a fundraiser that will help the La Plata Human Society and helping the animals there to get adopted and raise money so they can get more business. I feel like making a fundraiser to help them will benefit the Human Society a lot because a lot of dogs and cats there need stable homes from where they came from and have a better life. Raising money for them can get food and different materials for the animals that they need in order to keep the Human Society going. My goals for today are researching how to create fundraisers and make one or organize a fundraiser for the La Plata Human Society. My major goals for the week are getting the fundraiser organized and ready to go. I am going to try and hopefully get the fundraisers going and organized together so that it will meet my requirements for this project.
Resilience Project
I wanted to do this project on something that not many people were going to choose. I chose ecological resilience, which is when an amount of disturbance that an ecosystem can withstand without changing self-organized processes and structures. I first was just going to do an overall look about ecosystems and how they overcome obstacles, but later I had a better idea. I wanted to do this project off of something that I was really into and close to, so I looked up different ecosystems in New Orleans, Louisiana, where my family is from. I found that there were oyster ecosystems in danger and different types of oyster habitats all over New Orleans that I could use for my project. I researched oyster ecosystems in the area and how they were facing situations that revolved around resilience. I really wanted to show how unique ecosystems use resilience and how they respond to a perturbation or disturbance, resisting damage and recovering quickly. I learned a lot during this and how unique oyster ecosystems really are. I found that from 1932 to 2016, on average, open water subsumed a chunk of wetlands the size of a football field every hour. Though 2016-now, the rate of loss has slowed. It has slowed down mostly because most of the vulnerable spots are already gone. But the slowdown isn't guaranteed to continue. If nothing changes Louisiana can loose another 1,000 square miles of land that contain many oyster and animal ecosystems by 2050. Though for oyster ecosystems it is really easy to recover from any disasters like the ones I was just talking about. Oysters are bivalve shellfish that are often referred to as "ecosystem engineers" because of their tendency to attach to hard substrate or other oyster shells to create large reefs made up of thousands of individual oysters. And these reefs play an essential role in the nearshore coastal and estuarine environment, providing habitat for many other species too. Oyster reefs serve as natural breakwaters though- their physical structure absorbs the force of waves, creating calmer waters on shoreline sides of the reef and reducing the impacts of erosions. This is a big benefit for the ecosystems around them. For this project, I created an art piece showing the oyster ecosystem and what it looks like underwater. This was difficult to create because it was very detailed and hard to draw and paint, so I added some of my own touches to make it seem like more of an art piece that was special to me and what I would like to see for the oyster ecosystem. It looks the same as an original oyster ecosystem, but I added different colors and more of a meaning to it. This was sort of difficult to make all together but I feel like it came out in a really unique, special way. The most important lesson this project piece taught me as a person was to keep going and never give up in difficult situations. Just like the oyster ecosystems, I feel like I can keep growing and keep doing the things I love as a person. This really gave me an experience to dive in and explore different ways ecosystems connect and rebuild together as one. I felt like I would never know that there were so many oyster ecosystems that actually came over resilience and had a benefit to the ocean. This project really helped me understand the meaning of resilience and how it effects us in all ways and how to grow and build together when you're knocked down or in a difficult situation.