DreamCatchers On The Move

Wow. It’s been a few days since the last post…but we’re done with our trip! Can’t believe it. I’ll give you a quick recap of our past couple of days, though.

Tuesday we woke up and got ready to go on the Morning Blend. It was a lot of fun…they were so supportive and comfortable to talk to on TV. If you want to watch the short segment, here’s the link! http://www.vegasmorningblend.com/videos/163436876.html

On the set of The Morning Blend!

After the talk show, we headed to our hotel to check in. We then met Michael Gagliano from Creekside Hospice for lunch. We gave him some materials, and he told us they’re on board! We’re excited to get on board with them. He gave us some names of schools we went on to visit later in the week.

Thursday morning we met with Candis Armour of Solari Hospice. Andrea and Nancy from Phoenix put us in touch with her, and she was a lot of help for us. They’re also excited to have DreamCatchers work with them, and she gave us some schools contacts as well. We visited with Carrington College, as they are focused on nursing. Paula Steinmetz was so helpful, though we just dropped in on her. It seems like DreamCatchers should stick there!

At Carrington College in LV

Anyway, aside from meetings, Vegas is a lot of fun. There is so much to see, and we really enjoyed getting to know the city. We even had a little time to go on a quick hike in the mountains! It was beautiful. I will try to post pictures at a later time. We drove home Friday morning, so Katie got to see a little bit of Orange County.

In Laguna Beach!

She had an early flight Saturday morning though, so she couldn’t stay for long. It’s been such a fun trip, and way more successful than we had expected. We’re so grateful HYSP gave us this opportunity! Thanks everyone, for following, and we will keep you updated on the success of clubs and DreamCatchers in the future!

Now we are finally in our last and final city…Vegas! We got here on Saturday after a long 8 hour drive from Phoenix. It would’ve normally been about 5 hours, but we stopped by the Grand Canyon, considering Katie had never seen it before! It was awesome, here are a couple pics from that stop…

After that couple hour detour, we arrived in Vegas at the home of a ND Alum who graciously offered to have us stay with him and his wife for a few days. We were exhausted from the long drive, so got to sleep right away!

Yesterday, we roamed around Vegas, getting a feel for the awesome city. We wandered around Treasure Island, then had a nice dinner with Tom and Janet, our hosts here in the city.

Today was pretty eventful, as we are trying to get the ball rolling for the last time on our trip! We headed out and stopped at Bishop Gorman High School, as Tom had let us know that the principal there is a Notre Dame grad. Perfect! We dropped in on him, and he was kind enough to give us a few minutes of his time to explain what we are trying to do here in Vegas. He was excited to pitch the idea to some students, so took some brochures and we’ll hopefully be in contact as the school year starts back up. They even just put in a Grotto- replica of sorts at the high school; so that was awesome!

Katie and I with Mr. Kiefer, principal of BG H.S.

We then headed over to Faith Lutheran High School, hoping to find someone to speak with a little about DreamCatchers. Unfortunately, everyone there was in a meeting, and not many staff members were even in the office for the summer. We left some info, so hopefully we will hear from them when summer is drawing to an end. 

Later today, we got a call from a reporter at the Las Vegas Review Journal, who wanted to interview us for a story! We went and spoke with him for a while, and he said the article would be published in the education section of the paper on August 7th. A little later than what we initially expected, but I think it will be great regardless because of the recognition that will hopefully come to the newly established clubs in the Las Vegas area. Any coverage at all is wonderful, as it always helps us to get our mission out there and hopefully hear from some interested students/hospices. We planned a few more meetings for the week, so we’re excited for what’s to come! Only 4 more days of our trip, though…it went by so fast!

Sorry for the delay in posting, we’ve been pretty busy around here! Two days ago, we met with the mom of one of the future Hesburgh Scholars. She teaches at Xavier High School, so we thought we’d see if she would be interested in helping a club get started there. She was great, and so excited to bring it to Xavier! We also had a lot of fun talking about Notre Dame, making us even more excited about returning to school! 

After that, we headed off to Sun Valley Hospice in Mesa, AZ. Not too far away, and it’s sooo beautiful there! We met with the executive director and volunteer coordinator there, who were both the nicest people ever. They were so enthusiastic and ready to get started, and even offered to go around to schools and churches themselves to find interested students! That takes a lot off of our plate, so we were really excited to hear that. We are hoping they find some students quickly so they can get off the ground; we loved their excitement, and it really gave us a lot of hope for the future of DreamCatchers in Arizona.

With Sun Valley hospice outside their beautiful office!

A little later, we had a quick photoshoot with College Times, who will be publishing an article about our travels- so exciting! We had a quick dinner at Paradise Bakery after that, then headed back to plan for the next day.

Yesterday, we woke up and headed off to a meeting with Mesa Community College. We met with a couple of staff members from the Service Learning Center, who were excited about DreamCatchers but also interested in how to keep their students more involved in community service. We are excited to see how the club grows there, and how it can become a community project around Mesa.

We had some downtime yesterday, so I did some planning for Las Vegas. Phoenix has turned out to be our most successful city, with at least 4 hospices we are connected to, and 5 or 6 schools that are interested! Later in the day, we headed over to Old Town Scottsdale to meet Kim and Buzz for dinner. It was a lot of fun and a nice break from our usual routine- we walked around the town and enjoyed the great company we had for the night!

In Phoenix so far, we have received a lot of interest from hospices. Yesterday we met with Solari Hopsice who is headquartered here in Phoenix but has bases in Houston and Las Vegas (how convenient!). We had a great lunch at a cute local place. They were VERY helpful, gave us some great ideas for expansion and efficiency, and are helping to connect us in Las Vegas. Thanks Solari! We cannot wait to get up to Vegas.

Our meeting with Solari. So nice!

Today, we met with Hospice Compassus down in Casa Grande, AZ. Like their branch in Nashville, this Hospice agreed to partner with DreamCatchers and provided us with a long list of contacts in the area. We dropped in on some high schools in the area and had some success with Vista Grande and Mission Heights. The lady we met with teaches at Central Arizona College in the Social Work Department. How perfect! She seemed excited to bring it into her department there as well.

Lots of driving around here (sometimes places are up to an hour away) but who can complain when it is so pretty! Great views everywhere, we love it here!

We have forgotten to update the blog for a few days now (and been SUPER busy), so hopefully this post will be good enough to catch us up! 

Nashville has been awesome. Ever since the Tennessean wrote a story about our coming to town, Caitlin and I have received many many requests for meetings and have been very busy with all of the referrals. Tuesday we stopped in at Vanderbilt and found someone in the administration who was very excited about (hopefully!) finding a student to take on a DreamCatchers club. We also stopped by Taylor Swift’s condo building, but couldn’t make it past the guards. Oh well.

Gilda’s Cancer Support Community met with us on Wednesday morning. They were ready to form connections in the community and start referring patients right away. They are located super close to Vanderbilt and Belmont so they will probably be able to work with students from those schools. The lady we met with is on the national board for these clubs, so DreamCatchers may spread to more of those as well. Fingers crossed. After that, we stopped by the Tennessean offices to meet with a journalist and then we went on to meet with someone from Make A Wish to talk about ideas, problems and the community here in Nashville. We also had a request for a dream! Even though this trip was not supposed to be focused on individual dreams, we decided to try and grant this one in the short time we had left here in Nashville. We visited the family, talked and learned more about the dream. Working on the logistics took up the rest of our night!

Thursday we woke up early and headed over to Belmont University to meet with someone in the School of Social Work. She had several students in mind and agreed to speak, not only to her students, but to other schools in the community about joining with DreamCatchers. We went strait over to Gary Musick Production Company and then onto TSU to meet with another chair of the School of Social Work there. TSU is connected to several other colleges in the area through their undergrad social work program and their masters program. They plan to collaborate in starting a club. Eventually, we made it over to Alive Hospice where we connected, not only with the staff, but also with students from 2 different high schools in the area who are already volunteering with the hospice. They are very excited and I am confident that they will follow through with a DreamCatchers club this fall. There are plenty of schools for the hospices to work with!

 We ended the day going back to the house of the hospice patient who had the dream. We were able to help the family out and visit again!

Off to Phoenix bright and early tomorrow….

Today consisted of random drop-in’s and planning on the go, which has been pretty successful thus far! [I apologize in advance for the lack of photos...it slipped my mind!] After the article in the Tennessean was published, we were contacted by a lady whose father had a Dream and she was wondering how to get involved with DreamCatchers. I figured we may as well try to grant the Dream while in town since we were notified early on, so I wanted to find out more details about this man and his Dream. I dropped in on Alive Hospice (though our meeting there isn’t until Thursday), trying to find out who was in charge of this patient and how to contact them. I talked with a few helpful people who told me I would get a call from the social worker in charge of him later in the day. That’s as far as I could go with that for now.

I decided to kill time and figure out my next move, so drove downtown to a Walgreens to pick up a few things. The drive there, though, was more eventful than I had expected. Perfect timing too, as I was struggling to come up with somewhere to go next. A lady called and said she was the volunteer coordinator at Hospice Compassus, and had read about our mission in Nashville in the Tennessean a few days ago. She wanted to meet with me to discuss more on how to partner with us! I am becoming more and more thankful for that article in the paper- it has already helped so much! We decided on a time a few hours later, so I was glad that had developed for the day.

My next exciting move of the day consisted of driving to Kinko’s, making copies of all the forms we had been running low on, and driving back to the hotel. I then arranged some folders while eating lunch, then headed back out for my meeting with Julie from Hospice Compassus. We met at a local Starbucks, and talked in more depth about what would be involved if they decided to partner with us. She seemed very excited and ready to get going with it, (as so many have proven to be!), so I now have more schools and connections to make to get that club up and running for them. Yay!

{Side Note}:I LOVE Nashville. There is so much going on, and everyone is so nice! I could probably live here. Except it’s been so gloomy with thunderstorms…where’s the sun?

Later, I had a nice dinner with my aunt, who told me some awesome news regarding DreamCatchers! Stay tuned, and you’ll find out what it is! Let’s just say, there are big things to come…

Hello from Nashville, TN! We finally got here, after a long day of traveling (flight delayed, ugh). So far though, we love it! Other than the fact that we got in the car and it started POURING. Not just raining, but actually pouring. Out of the blue. Weird.

Anyway, we’re in our hotel room downtown now, planning for the week. We’re hoping for success here in Nashville! Will update you more as we get started here in Music City.