As a newcomer to the New Orleans Project, (and a newcomer to blogging)I've spent the past few minutes scrolling through this blog for inspiration. And after seeing all of the history that exists in these posts, documenting the last several years of the NOLA project, I am delighted and honored to be writing the first official post of the 2015 team!

We had our first team meeting today, and after a little "fun" with a 9:30am ice breaker, which I'm told is customary, we got down down to business.

First order of business was watching 2014's video made by Riley. The video brought back reminiscing smiles from the returning members, and I think I speak on behalf of all of the new members when I say that it added a dimension of reality to our future that stirred up quite a bit of excitement!

After receiving our personalized binders, we covered some logistical things and proceeded to tackle some fun but important decisions, such as our team theme, our team shirt color, and team song ideas.

I'm pleased to announce that after some intense brainstorming, idea tossing, discussion, and voting, we arrived at the the theme, "Art Invigorates". And after Angela tossed around some super creative color descriptions such as "Baby's Bottom Pink," and "Jeffery's Shoe Green" we arrived at our top two color choices of maroon and mint green, with a final color to be determined next meeting.

Finally, we spent the end of our meeting discussing some very important aspects of fundraising, from our Indiegogo site and donation letters, to our raffle and the bake sale.

It was an early Sunday morning for the group, but the air was full of excitement for everything that is to come. We have a lot of work ahead of us but we have a great and committed group. We're one meeting in but it's all starting to become real and we couldn't be more excited.

-Sebastian