Training Log Archive: barb

CRLS won Junior Nationals! Gold - Bronze - Gold.

I was thinking it might be useful/interesting to publish the story of how the team trained, including the exercises and training schedule. The team split once CRLS's spring season started, into those training officially through the school with Ethan, and those training with Navigation Games. Plus, Vilppu and Keegan are on the JDT, getting weekly emails and having monthly phone calls with Greg Ahlswede.

C • Story 10

Draft press release - hoping to generate interest to grow participation locally.

One-man relay at Putnam Ave Upper School team practice.

Biked to Amigos, but no kids chose to go orienteering. Biked to Hoyt Field, where I met the team from Putnam Avenue Upper School, their PE teacher, and 3 Brazilian coaches. The kids were awesome. I encouraged them to sign up for the Mayor's Program.

Today Ethan is coaching the high school team.

Tonight Pavla and Juan will take a couple CRLS kids for some training at Menotomy.

Tomorrow we have two middle school practices, two primary school classes, official high school practice, and unofficial high school practice.

Thursday: one middle school practice, two primary school classes, CSU park-O.

Friday: model event at Junior Nationals!

Excited that we'll be fielding CRLS teams at three levels at Junior Nationals!

Also excited about starting to coach orienteering teams at 4 middle schools next week.

Also looking forward to Take Your Child to Work Day at Google next Thursday.

Looking forward to seeing Liisa and Bernie this weekend.

Yup!

Yesterday, Pavla and Juan offered some ideas for improving the skills stations we use with middle and high school students. Juan convinced me to abandon pace counting, which was a pretty tough sell, let me tell you. We are substituting it with laying out lengths on a playing field: 100m (red flag), 50m (yellow flag), 25m (blue flag) and 10m (black flag). The students look at those lengths, walk them, get used to them, and then estimate other distances on the schoolyard: is the distance "blue"? is it between "yellow" and "red"? Is it further to that tree or to that flagpole? Emphasis on relative distances, and a few "chunks" of distance.

They will see those distances on three different scale maps, because we are using 1:2500, then 1:4000, then 1:10000 maps during the two days with NCDS.

I also revised the cards we will use for working on holding the map and direction. Here is the new design. The dashed line is for your thumb. I still need to make the ones for left-handed people.



Here is the back side:



We have a small but thriving group of kids from the high school training for orienteering.

C • Cards 2

Got to silver on GuideStar.

Ran a little to get to our Google appointment. Juan, Pavla, Ethan and I toured the space where we'll set up Animal-O and other orienteering related games for Bring Your Child to Work Day later in April. Am extremely psyched. Pavla and Juan just keep coming up with ideas about how to make everything great.

Spent a bunch of time today preparing 2017 annual report for Navigation Games, by getting all our finances organized in QuickBooks Online. Fun!

Our main goal for 2017 was to expand our outreach to kids in the Cambridge area and beyond, with a willingness to take a loss to do so. We anticipate that investing in this outreach up front will enable us to charge more for our programs in coming years and/or get grants to support our work to create a more sustainable future.

We provided 462 hours of programming, reached 1488 kids, with 8,528 participant-hours of orienteering-related activities.

Looking ahead, we would like to get to financial sustainability, and improve the management and operations of the non-profit.

Total income was $26,093, and expenses were $30,352, for an operating deficit of ($4,258). Note that we did not receive a $3000 grant I had been expecting to get for the Mayor's Program, which would have made up the bulk of that deficit. (We did just find out that we got the grant for this coming summer.)

Most of the income was donations: we received a grant of $1,000 and donations of $16,697 in cash and $2,804 in materials and supplies.

Most of the expenses were for personnel: $24,439 paid for employees, and an additional $485 for professional help and a contractor.

Our programs brought in $5,591 in payments from schools, after-school classes and the Forest-X events.

The in-school programs reach the most children, efficiently.

The summer program looks most expensive in terms of dollars per kid or program hour, but it also is the way that we reach out to many other youth organizations, and develop new curricula and projects - it was the jumping off point for the after-school teams for example. As a way to fulfill our mission, it is a good investment in both long-term involvement of kids, and breadth of reach. It was also the way that we were able to bring Ethan on board initially.

The public events have the potential to bring in more revenue and are fairly cost-effective to put on. Corporate events could also bring in revenue in the future.

We started with $7,056 in assets (bank, less credit card liability), and ended with $2,857.

hi!

Put out easter eggs and flags. Took longer than expected. A good workout for me!

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