Day Job

If you are here to get a crafty fix, here's your yarn. (This will be magically transformed into a Nantucket Red sweater.)

If that's what you came for, you can stop reading now.

Bye.

Today I get to tell you about my other love. My job. For real. I am one of those rare people in this world that gets to do something they love AND get paid for it. Hate me. I don't blame you. Really, it's ok.

Thing is, I feel a bit like Chandler from Friends. No one really knows what I do, nor do they understand despite me explaining it over and over. I am an early childhood network coordinator. This means that I manage a group (a collaboration) of people who have decided they want to work together to make the lives of little kiddos and their families better. Instead of fighting over limited money and saying my way rocks, go away, we have decided that together we can accomplish more. We truly believe it takes a village to raise a child. I know, isn't that cool? So I come to work Monday-Friday (sometimes some Saturdays) and I get to go to meetings and talk about things like getting information out to parents, helping kids see doctors, making sure that people who take care of kiddos have opportunties to keep learning. I get to be a nerd and look at lots of data and try to figure out where we have what we call "gaps in services" and how as a community we can figure out how to make it better. And I love it.

Now, I got hired on to serve on a team working all over the state to help other communities understand what it means to play nice and work together and help those who want to do it make it work. I get to do more of what I love!

I know. It rocks. See this pic? This is the pic of someone in a professional happy place.

Hope you find your happy place today!

There may be ways in which we can work for change. We don't have to do dramatic things or devote our entire lives to it. We can lead normal lives but at the same time try hard not to be bystanders.



- Helen Bamber