02 Aug Time Flys

These past few weeks have been extremely busy with projects both in the office and back at home. Since school is coming around the corner as well as the end of my internship, it was easy to get off track of things. My 3 projects in the Southeast Office are finally winding down from weeks of working on them. My first project was creating and developing a Latinx Community Catalog with organizations from the 11 US states and territories in the National Park Service’s Southeast region. This catalog holds potential organizations for collaboration for parks in the area to conduct partnerships to engage the Latinx community. My second project is to create a cultural/heritage event toolkit for parks to use if they want to implement a new project in their park catered to the Latinx community. This general toolkit provides basic information about starting a new program with their parks such as ideas, examples, project planning, and reflection information to help out. My last and final project was to develop an interpretative program for a park of my choosing on a Latinx figure. I chose Loreta Janet Velazquez, a Cuban-immigrant to who fought as a man in the American Civil War. I chose the three parks where she actually fought in: Battle of Shiloh, Bullrun/Manasass, and Fort Donelson.  A few of my ‘on the side’ projects was to also keeping in touch with the other LHIP interns in the South region; this included the interns at the Everglades, San Juan, and at Timucuan. I am to also showcase what those interns have done for their internships and for Latino Conservation Week. Right now, I am finalizing everything to make it look presentable to National Park Service employees. I am sad that I won’t be able to attend the conference in Colorado to meet with the rest of the LHIP and ETA interns (due to my new job back home) but I know that they will all have a great time for me! Check out my last blog post the week after my internship where I will reflect my LHIP internship!