Hello, and welcome back to the WGVU Engage Blog! It has been a while since we've done much with this blog but it’s time to change that. As a committee, we just celebrated our 2nd year anniversary and couldn't be happier with how far we've come! From 12 original members to well over 300 people (and counting), we have a lot more we want to do and have some REALLY exciting things coming up in our 3rd year. One of those REALLY exciting things directly involves me, as well as our five Engage Initiatives; Inclusion, Health, Arts, Veterans, and Education (which can cleverly be remembered by the acronym I HAVE). Because of that, I get to be your resident blogger for at least the next 7 months, but hopefully long past that as well. I am going to attempt to post once a week, and I promise the posts will be something to look forward to. I don’t think we did ourselves justice with the previous blog posts and it’s high time we shared with the world what our committee is doing and why it’s important. So with that being said, lets go!!
If I’m going to be talking at you (although my hopes are I’m ENGAGING you), you should probably know the basics of who on earth I am. I do not work for WGVU, I cannot afford to financially support WGVU, I’m not being paid to write this blog, and to be honest, until 2 years ago I knew nothing about WGVU. I am a member of the community who happened to volunteer for an event WGVU was putting on, and that event just happen to change my life. My name is Alison and I don’t give my support to anything I don’t 100% believe in. I have been a community member in West Michigan all my life and am a proud Grand Rapidian to the core. I’ve started on a long, personal journey because of WGVU Engage and I think it is something that needs to be archived and shared. Lucky for me they like me over at WGVU and entrusted me with the password the this blog :)
With so many weeks of writing ahead I’m not going to get too in depth now but here are the basics. The event that changed my life was LZ Michigan back on July 3, 2010. Long story short, any proceeds from LZ Michigan were to be put into an Endowment Fund as a scholarship for Veterans or Veterans’ dependents. (I will explain the event and scholarship in more detail later). Unfortunately there wasn't much in the way of proceeds and there are rules on how long you can take to fund an Endowment. Like I said, I don’t work at WGVU so I don’t know the ins and outs, I just know if we don’t get this thing funded by next July it goes bye bye. I am the dependent of a Veteran who was blessed to be able to go to college and I am not OK with this scholarship “going bye bye”. It needs upwards of $20,000 to be established which is no small undertaking. I can’t financially do much to help, but that doesn't mean I can’t do anything, so I volunteered to run a 25K race in order to raise the funds. Sounds simple enough: get people to sponsor a mile, run the race, raise a few grand. Biggest problem. . .running the race. I am not a runner. I am not an athlete. I have been overweight my entire life and get winded walking up a flight of stairs, so logically I would volunteer to run 1400 miles (and yes 25K feels like 1400 miles). This scholarship is that important to me. LZ Michigan changed my life and this is my way of saying thanks.
I have a long journey ahead, but have so many countless people helping me out, it’s truly humbling. What’s even more humbling are the people who have said I've inspired them to want to do something in the community themselves. This is what WGVU Engage is all about. It’s so easy to sit back and complain about the problems in our community but we are standing up and doing something about it. I am standing up and doing something that is absolutely terrifying, overwhelming, and intimidating. The running part is going to be hard enough but the sharing with you why I’m doing this and letting you into this very personal journey is what’s even scarier. My hopes are I do inspire you to get up and do something. Even if it’s not with Engage, do something to improve our community, or to improve yourself. The minute we all start living up to our full potential is the minute the world around us becomes that much brighter and this whole “getting up and doing something” becomes that much more contagious.
So that's the basics of where we're heading. I hope you will enjoy reading as much as I enjoying writing and if you're really enjoying it, the biggest compliment I could get would be for you to share this with your friends. Until next week. . . .I guess I'm off to run!
