Week 3

 This past week, I have been pretty busy working on my legislator list some more.  This time I am adding personal information to the spreadsheet, including universities and churches attended and current and former affiliated organizations.  With this information, it will be easier to predict how they will vote, what issues they are passionate about, and if there are any potential connections we already have with them due to common affiliations.  Furthermore, this information gives us an idea about who the legislators are listening to.  By knowing that, we have the next best thing to speaking directly to the senator or representative themselves.  This project is taking more time than any of the other ones did, mostly because not all of the information is always in the same place.  However, it has been good for me to learn how to do this type of research, especially since I have become more efficient at it the more that I do it.

Last Tuesday, I also went on another couple of field trips with Kim.  The first one was to the America Votes meeting, where various progressive organizations throughout the state came to discuss current labor and human rights conditions in Ohio.  It was pretty cool to see all of these diverse organizations in one place and listening to them debate what was going on and what the future actions should be.  The setting of the meeting actually reminded me a bit of Dr. Fairfield's class, in that everyone sat in a circle and, after each presentation, discussed and debated what they just heard.  Later that day, Kim and I went to OSU for a LGBT world-cafe for a couple of hours.  I had never been to a world cafe before, so it was an interesting experience.  We sat in tables of 3 to 5 people and answered questions about what we expected from a community, and then switched to a new table with new people to answer a different question.  Although most of the people there were LGBT students and faculty from OSU, it was a good experience to be able to listen and talk to such a variety of people.  I believe that I added a unique perspective as well, speaking as a "straight ally" from a small private school like Xavier.

This coming week, Kim will be out of the office so I will be working more independently most of the week.  However, I still have plenty of work to keep me busy.