Operation+H.O.P.E

__**Operation H.O.P.EOperation: H.O.P.E (>'.')><('.'<)**__ __**Helping Others Participate in Education!**__


 * Bianca Maderazo, Josh Falzon, MaryJayne Amos, Rania Dacion, Andre Bruzzese, Maddie Rooney**

With our main values being family, love, respect and education, we thought that the Edmund Rice Foundation would be the perfect organisation for us. The organisation helps people who don't have english as their first language such as the refugees. They assist them by giving them a better education and helping them fit in with Australia's society.
 * Organisation and Shared Values**

-To help refugees have a better future with education. -To provide a better learning environment. -To help and support the edmund rice foundation. -Making a life long difference.
 * Aim and Purpose:**

-That we are able to renovate one of their classrooms and to help provide them with a better learning environment.
 * Desired Outcomes:**

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 * Our google doc link:**


 * Questions you need to ask and answer:**

**Blog**

This is where you write you weekly or daily achievements and logging of events.

5/9 LJ - This is how you begin each section that you write. You write the date and your initials and then what you did that day, a reflection as well as a detailed account of what was done and what still needs to be done.

5/9 EC - Each member of each group must contribute to the Blog every Tuesday as a reflection; this should be in your own words. However, you should be working on your Outreach in your own time therefore all that work must also be Blogged on the day of which that happens. Happy Blogging!

6/9 RD- So far, my group has finally created a set plan on what to do which was helping the foundation by renovating on of their rooms and MAYBE (if we have the time) we might aid them by tutoring them with anything they need help with. So i guess so far, we are waiting for the GO signal so... my group has created a letter to the Edmund Rice Foundation. Just today, a member from the Western Bulldogs came over and talked about how he helps the community by supporting multiculturalism and how he helps the community. Later, all the groups split and did different activities. The activities were phone and manners, letter and emails, how to show and use respect and also meeting and greeting. This was really useful, as we are able to apply these skills when doing our outreach. This was a great day in all the learning that we did.

6/9 BM - Last week in DEAL we started choosing the foundation or group we wanted to support and that group was called the Edmund Rice Foundation. We had to choose this foundation out of ActionAid because the closest place where they helped was in Australia. We chose the Edmund Rice Foundation because it is located in our community such as St. Albans and Sunshine. We started planning on the things we want to improve, such as their learning conditions. We were thinking of having a fundraising event in school (such as a sausage sizzle) to help us get the funds for our project. Today we had a guest speaker talk to us about what the footy club, the Western Bulldogs does to help their community. They talk about helping the refugees "fit in" to Australia's society and the fundraising they do to help. We also had a rotation consisting of 4 different stations. One was about teamwork, another was about respectful support, one on how to write letters and e-mails and the last one for phone manners and meeting and greeting. It gave us really good information and tips on how to treat people and how to work together.

6-9 JF - In the past few weeks we have been discovering all the organisations we chose a organisation which was 'action aid', we then realised that wasn't the one for us so last week we found a more suitable foundation called 'edmund rice foundation' which is the one we are going with now. Today we have a quest speaker coming and with him is a photographer from the news paper.

6/9 MJA- Last Week we talked about the different possibilities and different organisations that we could help. After having a look at some organisations we came to the conclusion that we would help refugees through the Edmund rice foundation. We felt that they closely matched our values and we wanted to have a realistic and achievable difference. We chose this because it was also a community based organisation and was close to us. The centre we chose to focus on was in St.Albans, we concluded that we would try to renovate the room where the refugee children get tutored. Our plan was also to tutor the kids and spend some time with them. Today we also had a guest speaker come in and speak to us, his name was Chris and he was from the Western Bulldogs football club, he was a community worker that represented the club. He basically spoke about how the club helps communities in particular the refugee community. The thing that i got our of it was that he said that "Don't try to reinvent the Wheel". That made me realise that we needed sponsors and the support of the entire community to be able to get this done. One of the ideas we discussed was that we were going to ask a company to sponsor us and we also wanted to have a sausage sizzle to raise money for the room renovation. Along with that we wanted to ask local schools to donate unwanted books so that the children would have new resources and a better learning environment. We also had a group rotations, one of them talked about team work and work as a unit rather than individuals. Another group was respectful support which was basically learning how to treat people which the correct amount of respect. We also had a email group which told us the right ways for us to write emails to businesses and lastly we had a phone manners and meet and greet manners, we learnt the proper procedures to use when calling a business and what to do when you meet people.