Disclaimer: this post is not actually about babies, just new faces.
After a long interview process, LIFT-Chicago has chosen 30 new volunteers for the 2012-2013 school year! This weekend, the LIFT Leadership Team and the Site Coordinators guided the newcomers through an intense training process that lasted all day Saturday and part of the day on Sunday. Although I am not part of the Leadership Team, I volunteered to help with one particularly fun activity on Saturday: Client Survivor.
Client Survivor is an activity which simulates the process of obtaining housing in our society, and we implement it in order to give new volunteers an understanding of what their clients will be going through when struggling to find somewhere to live. We gave each person (or pair) an identity with a detailed financial background and sent them off to “Chicago” (aka the 3rd and 4th floors of Mundelein) to try to find housing through the various organizations we set up in different rooms. We had several stations representing landlords, emergency shelters, etc., and the Leadership Team member sent to run each location was told to be unreceptive, rude, and cold to anyone who came looking for housing. We even had an LT member who represented the CTA and closed random staircases and elevators to represent the maddening construction. The only person allowed to be helpful was me because I represented LIFT, though I was extremely limited in what I could do for each person since there were so many people to help in a short period of time. Half of our new volunteers secured a place to live, while the other half gave up in frustration.
All in all, I think it was a fairly successful exercise: I remember being frustrated but extremely humbled trying to “find housing” while participating in it last year, and I know that it has helped me to empathize more with my clients who struggle to apply for housing because of racism, their socioeconomic background, etc.
Here’s a picture of me from last year’s New Volunteer Training–I think that we were commiserating over the difficulty of the Client Survivor Exercise, because it seems like I was being particularly emphatic about something.
Why I LIFT for LIFT-Chicago 
I find it hysterically appropriate that the people who represent the CTA are responsible for BLOCKING people’s access to locations. Wow, is THAT ever true!