Yes, yes. The Inaguration of the next, and first African-American Presidante of the United States of American is happening next Tuesday. Not to mention the day before we celebrate the life and times of Mr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who committed himself to social change and the betterment and equality of all Americans. Many websites are encouraging the American people to take part in these historic two days, asking people to volunteer, serve, work in their communities, and tune into live broadcasts of Mr. Obama's speech.

So, I'm going to take the service ride and keep going. I'm currently volunteering with the UNICEF Tap Project. I'm one of the 5 SF City Coordinators. One of the big reasons why I signed up was to help raise funds for water projects all over the world- especially supporting women and children. UNICEF estimates that nearly 900 million people across the globe have little access to clean or safe drinking water. Just imagine that for a few minutes.  The cause is truly inspirational and WE can do something about it. 

The goal of the project is to find volunteers who can get restuarants to sign up to promote the Tap Project during World Water Week (March 23-28). These restuarnts in turn will encourage costumers to donate a dollar for UNICEF's world wide projects. This is the third year UNICEF has ran this campaign and it's been tremendously successful! This year, we're going for an even bigger bang.

Check out this video to learn more about the issues at hand, and what the US Fund for UNICEF is doing about it.

If it inspires you, please register at the Tap Project website, and you'll be sent a volunteer packet in the mail. If you live in a major city, check to see if there is a regional face to face training with UNICEF City Coordinators. (San Francisco is happening on Saturday, Feb. 21st) If you DON'T live in a major city- no worries! The volunteer guide will give you all the necessary info on how to sign up restaurants, help get the word out about this important cause, and encourage dining in participating restuarants!

If you're on YouthNoise- join the project platform of the Tap Project and chat it out with your fellow YN users.  

This opportunity is fun, exciting, doesn't take too much time, and is very rewarding. If you have questions, please post them below, and hopefully see you out there recruiting restuarants this spring! 

Why did the New York City DROP Summit rock? Probably because of all those steallar projects (we'll write some blogs about this later), amazing participants (seriously, the ideas were flowing), and totally engaged partners (the workshops were very exciting and very informative)

Big thanks to the Mayor Bloomberg's office for donating the water bottles.

Parsons The New School for Design, Communications, Design and Technology Department helped welcome the students as well as helping to co-sponsor the entire event. They also had two student projects on display- One was a projection piece displaying the liters of water it takes to produce and apple, and a hamburger. Check it Out. Pretty crazy huh? This is changing my mind on becoming a vegetarian, or eating way less meat. (7 liters to produce an apple, 4,700 liters of water to produce a hamburger)

One of the other Parsons projects that I thought was interesting was the "water is" piece which was a projection of water bubbles. You got a number to text on your phone and one of the bubbles would essentially POP and tell you an interesting fact on water.

We encouraged all the participants to check out these projects throughout the day and I really thought it added that extra pizazz that we were looking for.

More to come on all the sweet projects....