A collection of stuff

After the morning sessions we had a very good lunch at Gibraltar’s Point Centre for the Arts, a walk on the beach and then back for the last of the updates, a bit of strategic thinking and a scavengers hunt!

Today is TRIEC away day at the Toronto Islands where we talked about the relationship of Maytree with TRIEC, future Maytree projects that involve TRIEC in some way and an update on the TRIEC programs. It was a bit sad for me because this is the last away day I enjoy with the TRIEC team before moving 100% to the Maytree site.

We’ve finally unveiled the new Maytree website. Besides the friendly URL’s there is now a cleaner design and content that is better organized. We’ll be ironing the occasional wrinkle and adding new features in the next few days, so keep visiting.

I developed the Wordpress template from a design provided to us. Version 2.5 of Wordpress makes things much easier than I thought they would be and I was able to find some very cool plugins to do things such as the sitemap and navigation menus. It’s not perfect, I’ll try to improve it as I get the time, but the end result is pretty solid, good, semantic html markup and nice css (although that could use a clean-up as well.

By the way, you better like it!

• We threw Liz a surprise get-together. It was surprising. She liked it, seems like. #

She conveniently was born right in the middle of the Holidays break, when no one in the office is here, and she always insists that that’s ok. In fact, she insists so much that she was practically daring us to do it. So, Loreli finally took the challenge to organize a little get-together after work and got Liz to go to a bar under false pretenses (well, it actually isn’t that difficult) where we all were waiting.

The bar, by the way, is on the rooftop of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Toronto and it has a great view of Queen’s Park and Downtown Toronto.

Stella and me went to Kitchener-Waterloo to deliver training on The Mentoring Partnership to the mentoring project there which is being delivered by the KW YMCA and WRIEN. With us were Marilena Benak from YMCA and Helen Chen from WRIEN.

In the first part of the training Stella showed them how we conduct our program, the way we recruit mentors and how we assess them and the mentees. We went through the different forms and procedures that we have developed. They had many questions and although they do some of the things differently, they realized why we do things the way we do, and why some things had worked and others hadn’t. Some of what we do is because we have many more partners, but much of the stuff they thought really useful.

Then we went for lunch. To a nice family restaurant. We all had schnitzel! And it was very good. I was the only one who finished the whole thing. Take that, you skinny girls!

The second part of the session was on the matching application that we use. We went through how to add a new mentor or mentee, how to manage them, how to create new pairs, and some of the situations they might encounter when matching. They didn’t have too many questions right now, but I’m sure most will come when they start using it. We told them about the Coaches Corner and how they will be able to ask questions, download forms and share their own experience there.