Bridges Of Respect

Hello everyone

As we celebrate Bridges Of Respect's merger as a CAA program this month we're also celebrating it's 10 year anniversary! Over the last decade the program has provided over one thousand presentations in schools throughout the Twin Cities and St Cloud reaching students that number in the tens of thousands.

High schools have been our most common venue and colleges second most. We've also recently tailored two of our presentations for middle school students. I'm proud to say that we often get invited back to a classroom once we've presented there once but, sometimes teachers switch programs that were our way in or aren't doing a debate theme that they were doing before, some teachers switch schools or careers all together, some retire and so forth. Keeping our presentations requests on the incline is an ongoing challenge and something we can always use help with.

Lately, we've been ramping up the Bridges Speakers Bureau to help make it easier for more people to get involved in presenting as well as, with the program in general. We meet about once a month to discuss the program's progress, practice presenting or watch others to provide feedback, and help hone people's presenting skills. Bridges has its own rapport where we log teacher and school information as well as, history entries of completed presentations. Bridges also has an email list to keep you updated on what's going on and its own wiki complete with presentation outlines. If you would like to get involved with Bridges as a presenter or to help with everything else that makes the program successful like compiling teacher email addresses, promotion, etc drop me an email: shannon@urth.org