Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Toolkits: Creating a Newsletter

By Jose Armendariz
Serving at the Boys & Girls Club of Santa Monica

Here, at the Boys and Girls Club of Mar Vista Gardens, we encounter so much creativity from every member. Members are able to apply and further develop their creativity with the different activities and resources available throughout the rooms inside the club. Also, the club incubates different groups such as Torch Club, Key Stone, Smart Girls, and Passport to Manhood, which interact within the club or the local community with their service or by organizing different events for the members to participate. So, there are always plenty of projects always going on, but photographs posted in the window’s office would be the only documentation of the happenings at the club. A newspaper emerged as an idea to engage members with creative writing, and as a source to document everything that was occurring at the club. A meeting was scheduled in order to designate roles for the members interested in participating as correspondents or editors. During that meeting members also voted for the newspaper’s name, “The Mar Vista Gardens BGC Bugle.”
The newspaper is a tool that will become sustainable after our service is completed because the content of it is brainstormed and elaborated by the members, and there is an official template that is only a click away from being updated each month.
The newspaper has been successful due to its flexible content, which changes every month according to the member’s topic of interest. The stories published in the newspaper depict the different likes, concerns, or queries of the writers involved in creating an article; and, each story is entertaining to read since it really portrays the character and spirit of the member in charge of it. Also, it is important to add that members rejoice being part of the newspaper crew since they discover new aspects of the club or the people inside of it. Members enjoy developing each story or article because they have to interact with other members or staff to get the information needed to finish their work. For example, members who are young and cannot explore the teen’s room; they can do so while writing a story regarding the teen’s perspective about a situation or an event. Members in charge of a story usually perform interviews in order to compile information to add to their story.
Overall, the newspaper has been well received by the members of the club, and the members in charge of it are truly excited to work on it.

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