A Check In

Welcome to more 20 Time madness! If I’m going to be completely honest, Emily and I have only gotten together once since the last 20 Time blog post that I posted just over a month ago. Both of our lives have been crazy with school work and lots of preparation for our AP test tomorrow (gaaahh! AP Human Geography . . . wish us luck!!!) so we had to put this project on the back burner for a while in order to focus on things that had very imminent deadlines, but we’re almost back on track!

When we did get together over this past month, we filled out the application for the food truck festival and we created a website that gives some information on our project and has an attachment that people can fill out to order some of the dog biscuits which we already have made. The website is in its preliminary stages, but you can still check it out here! Also, since the food truck festival is coming up very soon (Saturday, June 3) we are planning times when we can get together in order to churn out mass quantities of dog treats which everyone will love and hopefully we will be able to raise lots of money for MLAR!!

Learning New Things

20 Time has been going well overall! Emily and I haven’t been able to get together recently to make any more dog treats or to do any brainstorming on how to move the project forward, but this past week we did have a meeting with our mentor, and I think that it really helped to give a sense of direction to our project. Our mentor, who is the school’s graphic design teacher and one of the main people in charge of the food truck festival where we’ll be selling our treats, asked us lots of questions about our project, gave us more insight on how to start selling our dog treats and make it profitable, and gave us some ideas moving forward.

Taking the next steps!

During our meeting, our mentor suggested not doing the t-shirts at all, because the dog treats are the biggest selling point and he doesn’t want us to be pushing t-shirts on people, which can come off as annoying to buyers. We’re probably going to still make t-shirts for ourselves to wear at the booth when we’re selling, but we’re most likely not going to try to push t-shirts on people for extra sales. This actually helps us to better focus the efforts of our project moving forward, and we know what we’re going to have to focus on in the future. Our meeting also helped me to think about what I want to take away from this project. I think that our project will teach both Emily and I a lot about business, self direction, and l think that if we put in a lot of work for this project, we could turn it into a business, and the project will look very good on college and job applications as well 😉

One thing that both Emily and I have to do in the upcoming weeks is create a research paper that centers around our project. In my fourth blog post that I posted about a month ago, I created some driving questions for the project and the research paper. I think that some of the questions that I made (i.e. the ones that have to deal with dog nutrition) aren’t really going to help drive my paper at all. The one question that I made – “How will our money be able to improve the shelter and the conditions of all animals who don’t have homes?” – is probably the one question which I want to focus on out of the three that I’ve already formulated. I also want to

Emily and I taking off with our project

focus on starting up a business and how to run a business in my research paper, since I feel like I still need to learn a lot about running a business and how to keep one going before Emily and I are able to really take our project off the ground.

The Review

It’s been a while since my last blog post about my 20 Time project! It’s been going pretty well since my last update on the project! Emily and I got together this past weekend to send out some emails and work on planning out where we’re going from here. Our emails were well met, and we have found a mentor for our project and we have decided on a final project, which I’m very excited about!

Emily and I are planning on selling our dog treats and t-shirts at the Perkiomen Valley Food Truck Festival that’s going on this June! This event, which is held at our school, is a really big event that was started last year at the school, and I’m really excited to be a part of it! It’s held out in the high school parking lot, with various food trucks and vendors selling items, and last year it was really well received and there was a huge turnout. Hopefully it will be a nice day, and many people will bring their dogs along with them, which they can then buy a treat for from our stand.

This past weekend Emily and I also created a PowerPoint for our project pitch presentation which we did yesterday. Our whole GHEnglish class went into the tiny high school auditorium  and 6 or 7 teachers came down to listen to our presentations. Both Emily and I were nervous to give our presentation, but it was overall pretty well received by the three teachers who listened to our pitch.

The first teacher I’d say liked our ideas the best, and she gave good feedback about our presenting skills, which I think set us up well for our other two presentations. The second teacher didn’t really give much feedback, but she seemed to think that our project was a good idea and would be successful overall. The third teacher I thought liked our presentation, but she appeared to have lots of criticism of our project idea overall. She left a comment saying that she felt our selling of dog treats was “passive”, which I got a bit offended by at first, but I realize that if that’s how she felt then it’s good to get the criticism so that we can work harder to sell the dog treats and become more “aggressive” sellers.

I can definitely understand where she’s coming from, so I think moving forward Emily and I should get in touch with multiple places in which we could possibly sell our dog treats, like at the Perk Valley Pet Eatery, outside of grocery stores like Redner’s, and maybe even set up an Etsy page where people could order our treats online. I think that overall the presentations helped to refocus us a bit on the direction of the project and made us see where we need to go from here. Emily and I have a lot of work to do in the upcoming weeks, but I think (hopefully) we can manage it with our schoolwork and everything.

So here’s my version of the timeline for this project in our upcoming weeks
(including what our teacher has added in for us to do):

March 16 Deliverables	Project Pitch–see handout:  Autonomy,  Mastery, Purpose (AMP) Search for a Mentor If project is approved, complete the full 20 Time Proposal document. (see the “About” section of our Classroom page)  For March 28 Continue to search for selling venues/and continue to email people further about the project Start making dog treats!
March 21 Deliverables	Project underway, Research is underway; Blog post #5. Make dog treats, possibly an Etsy page and create tags to put onto each treat bag
April 4 Deliverables	Video Blog pitch (AMP handout)
April 18 Deliverables	Blog #6–progress, research, images of progress
May 2 Deliverables	Blog #8
May 16 Deliverables	Blog #10
May 30 Deliverables	Projects due…or next week. The food truck festival is in June, but we’ll provide updates/ information about the festival after this date

The Start

I’m excited to share with you guys what has been happening with my 20 Time Project so far! My project hasn’t taken shape yet (I’m not that good), but I have made some steps in the right direction.

My biggest achievement of the past week is my finding a partner to do the project with. I was talking to some of my friends in English about my project and we were all sharing our ideas, and it turns out that my friend Emily is making t-shirts to sell to make money to donate to a local shelter, so we decided to collaborate! You can check out her blog here.

We haven’t exactly worked out all the details of our collaboration yet, but we’re definitely going to do something that ultimately helps local shelters. As I mentioned, Emily is going to be creating t-shirts to sell and I’m going to be making dog treats, either to donate to the shelter or to sell to raise money to donate to the shelters.

So what have I been doing this past week besides finding a collaborate? Research!! I’ve been trying to do lots of research about dog treats, dog nutrition, and dog treat recipes. My original plan was to create my own dog treats, but having done some research I feel like following a recipe might work out just as well. Some recipes that I found include these homemade dog treats from pinchofyum.com, these cute ones from babble.com, and these vegetarian dog biscuits from kingarthurflour.com. 

After having looked at what I’ve done so far, for next week I’m hoping to have settled on one or more recipes that I want to make and, if possible, I’d also like to try to formulate my own recipe, which doesn’t have to be done by next week, but should be decided on soon. I’m also planning on working more with Emily to come up with a name for our project and find out which local shelter in our area to support. That means emailing people and shelters, looking into local shelters in our area, and maybe even emailing or talking to local pet stores to see if they would be interested in selling our products to raise money for the shelters instead of donating the treats directly to the shelters.

Well, there you guys go for this week! I feel like right now my ideas are kind of a jumble of words and feelings (as can be seen with this blog post), but they’re all excited feelings, which I think is important for a successful project. Hopefully by next week I’ll have a more cohesive understanding of what’s going on and then I’ll be able to better relay those ideas here on my blog. I’ll update everyone about my project again next week!

20 Time has begun

It’s that time of year again — 20 Time Projects! I’m both dreading and anticipating this project, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. 20 Time allows me to grow and do things that I would not be able to do within the constraints of the classroom (click here to visit the 20 Time website to learn more about it). It allows me to be completely in charge of a project that’s important to me and it allows me to make an impact on a larger community. While this is very exciting to me, it’s also scary to be completely in charge of a project, to be the one to make the instructions for how the project should be done.

So what am I going to do for my project? Well, I’ve been throwing some ideas around lately, but I think the most poignant project that I’ve come up with so far is making dog treats and giving it to shelters. First of all, I really enjoy baking and cooking, and I feel like that’s an area that I can expand on and use to fuel my project, but I had some trouble thinking about how these skills could make an impact on a larger audience. I was thinking about working with a soup kitchen, making a food service box where I got the ingredients and a recipe and gave it to people (a homegrown Blue Apron service, if you will), working with a food pantry, but none of these ideas really spoke to me. Then a friend suggested working with an animal shelter, and the perfect idea was born!

I’m very passionate about animals, especially dogs, and I’d take any opportunity I get to be able to help or work with animals. I think that this project is going to be a good amount of work, I’m going to have to learn about dog nutrition and any diet restrictions, I’ll have to test various recipes (my dog will be the official taste tester), and I’ll need to talk with local shelters in the area and see if they’re interested in working with me. If my plan with the shelter doesn’t work out I could try selling my dog treats, maybe to neighbors with dogs, or even try working with a local pet store. If I sold my dog treats instead of donating them to the shelter, I would donate the money most likely to a local shelter or to the ASPCA.