The National Youth Service Learning Conference is this week (April 6-9) in Atlanta, Georgia and I will be here soaking up as much as I possibly can over the next few days. There are so many great things about being here already, besides the obvious - it's about 20 degrees warmer than Michigan. So far, the Welcome Celebration last night featured good old southern cuisine (succotash, grits, fried chicken, BBQ sandwiches, fried okra) and brought together literally thousands of service learning advocates and practitioners to network and enjoy themselves. Today we workshop.

The big dilemma is deciding what to attend. I'll give you a snapshot of the issue: From 9:00 - 10:30 am there are 29 workshops, ranging in topics from Building Youth Leadership Councils, Moving from Service to Social Justice, Creating new Global Citizens, and Engaging Students with Disabilities in Service-Learning.

I at first determined to be practical; I would choose the sessions that best fit with the work I do. However, Angelia Salas from Learn and Serve - Michigan and a veteran of the conference, suggested that I try to find new topics to explore to widen my horizons and think in a new way. I might try that this time.

Hopefully I will be updating this blog daily to report out what has been happening at the conference.

(NOTE): Over some southern cuisine we met with Mike and Sasha from Learn and Serve - California. They have some amazing research and program development going on, as well as some insight into California State University's various service learning certification courses. I hope to explore that in a future blog.