Celebrate Positive Awards

  It has officially been 5 weeks at Phoenix Sister Cities, which is hard to believe, considering that means this internship is already a third of the way done.  Time is going by so quickly.
   The last few weeks I've been working on nominating some of our different sister cities for a 'Celebrate Positive' award.  These awards basically recognize different communities or businesses for the positive work they have done in their community.  My job has been to email contacts in our different sister cities asking them to tell me a little more about the positive work they have done in the last year.  Once I received those emails I then had to edit down the information for the nomination (to a measly 500 characters, simply not enough space to get in many details).  Only a few of our sister cities have responded thus far, but it has been a cool experience learning about some of the things others around the country have been working on.
   So far we've nominated Ramat-Gan, Israel and an organization called 'The Hamarshal Society for the Blind and the Prevention of Blindness' for holding its first feature film production.  The film production competition made visual media accessible to the visually impaired and created an opportunity for these individuals to be part of the film making industry through writing, cinematography, acting, and directing. It seemed like a really great project.
   We also nominated Chengdu China for its efforts in rural and urban environmental management.  They have been focused on putting in new greenbelts in the downtown area, building green homes, and reconstructing streets and green landscapes. Furthermore, we also nominated the City of Phoenix for its effort in raising money for the City of Chengdu, China after the earthquake they experienced a couple years ago.  The City of Phoenix raised over $177,000 to build a new kindergarten in a village of Chengdu that lost its only kindergarten to earthquake damage.  Again, a great example of a community coming together to do great work, which is what the Celebrate Positive awards are all about.
  I really enjoyed working on these nominations, because I learned a lot about the positive contributions going on in Phoenix and abroad.  I just wish more of our sister cities had responded so I could have heard about even more positive contributions around the world.  The awards are distributed sometime in October, and I'm anxious to see what nominated communities receive the honor.