Hour 7- ACE Mentoring: BC Talks & More Floorplan Development

Brainstorm Sesh

This week at ACE, we heard from the first of our mentors...Me! I talked to the students about the work that I do as a civil engineer & how it relates to their ongoing project of designing a coffee shop. Earthwork, utilities, and stormwater drainage. Extremely interesting stuff! We also had a guest mentor stop in to talk about landscape architecture. Slightly less interesting stuff! It became apparent to me during my presentation that when explaining something that we spend every day doing it may seem simple to us, but can easily be confusing to someone on the outside. My challenge was to simplify and make this stuff relatable to young people who are getting in at the ground level.

Afterwards the students broke up into 2 teams. Each team developed a floor plan and presented it to the rest of the team. While each team presented their plan, we talked about the ideas and continued to improve what the teams put together. Ideas like a patio garden, how customer seating would be laid out and the overall flow of the cafe were discussed. The cafe's floorplan was starting to become a product of the students.

Hour 5 - ACE Mentoring: Floor Plan Layout for the Coffee Shop

Tonight was the 2nd ACE meeting of the year. Some of the architect mentors explained 'bubble diagrams' to the students and the group created one for the coffee shop. The mentors then provided the students with a an archectual drawing of the site in whcih the coffee shop will go. The (theoretical) shop will sit between a pedestrian path and a light rail line, along the Willamette River here in Portland. Once the bubble diagram was complete, the team went to work on the floor plan layout; deciding what will go where. The customer seating area, bathrooms, the office and roasting room were all located somewhere within the building footprint. For the most part, the students were able to talk through the decision process but every so often a mentor would pose a question or idea in order to move the discussion along in a productive direction. This week we gave the the kids homework; go to your local coffee shop. Next week tell us what you like/disliked about the cafe.

The Coffee Shop...what, you couldn't tell?

Hour 3 - Blueberry Bushes for NAYA

Dr Martin Luther King Jr fought for equality, justice, and what he called 'the beloved community'. In the last 10 years, the MLK holiday has been paired up with volunteerism- presented as an oppurtunity for citizens to take action for the betterment of others.

This MLK weekend I signed up, by way of Hands on Greater Portland, to plant blueberry bushes for an organization called NAYA (Native American Youth and Family Center). NAYA operates a school and community center in NE Portland. They provide numerous services for youth, adult and senior Native Americans. For 30 years NAYA has 'provided educational services, cultural arts programming, and direct support to reduce poverty' for Portland's Native Americans. NAYA elders had requested blueberry plants that they could harvest in the Summer and use in baking. Nine other volunters, and myself, made up the group tasked with planting the bushes and building a temporary greenhouse to help the plants get through the Portland winter. The 10 of us varied in every way - size, color, and age. As the project came along each volunteer proved helpful in some unique way. In the two hours it rained & snowed and in the end the sun came out to see a dozen blueberry bushes and a makeshift greenhouse behind the NAYA run school.

Blueberry planting in January? Well, we did it. I was glad to learn about NAYA and show my support for the organization, whose efforts parallel the lasting legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

'This is how we do it!'

As an update to this entry: I later received an email from United Way-Portland, who organized the city-wide MLK Day volunteer effort. They said that 2,875 volunteers, gave 10,346 hours of community service over the 3 day weekend. Not too shabby.

Hour 1 - ACE Mentoring: Meet 'n Greet

Tonight was the first meeting of the 2012 ACE mentoring season, which I'll be taking part in. ACE is a national mentoring program focused on getting highschool students involved and familiar with engineering, architecture and construction management through mentoring. 2012 will be the Portland chapter's 5th year, and by far it's largest in terms of particpation - 91 students and 64 mentors in total. The students are placed on teams and paired up with mentors (local professionals working in the different fields) and given a project to design - this year our team will prepare the design of a coffee shop. We will meet 12 times in the next 5 months, each session focusing on a different element of project design. The ACE year will conclude in May, when the students will present their project to the other ACE teams.

Tonight the students and mentors met their fellow teamates and got a chance to walk the site where the proposed projects will go. 'The site' is along the Willamette River, across from downtown Portland, in an area called the Innovation Quadrant. As a civil engineer, it's encouraging to meet and work with kids who are genuinely interested in learning about the profession. It's also encouraging to meet the fellow mentors, who are also wanting to foster that kind of interest from students. I'm looking forward to sharing my experience with the students, but also learning from them & the other mentors.

Let's build us a coffee shop, kids.