Shameless plug

Today was my last day at my summer job. I'm not actually leaving for Germany until next Friday, but I figure I need the next week to pack, run some last minute errands, and maybe watch a little Star Trek, which is inexplicably only on during the day.

I've worked at this same place for parts of the last three summers, so I'm pretty used to leaving it by now. It's called Illinois Citizens for Better Care, and it's an advocacy group for residents of Illinois nursing homes. Working there these past years has taught me a lot about elder abuse and neglect, a subject I'd known nothing about before I started there. My supervisor is the staff attorney, and she would tell me stories about nursing home residents being illegally sedated, cursed at by staff, or otherwise treated badly. She tries to work with the Department of Public Health and the ombudsmen to help resolve complaints, and also advocates for greater family and community involvement in homes.

Because it's a non-profit, it's not a particularly rich organization. ICBC is just now getting its website off the ground, after about three years of trying to coordinate various short-term student workers and volunteers with experience in HTML to get various materials up on the web. Recently, people have been calling the office and complaining that searching for "Illinois Citizens for Better Care" on Google doesn't get people to the website. When we contacted Google, they said that the way to get the website into their search results is to have other people link to it on their websites. Maybe that's a "duh" rule for more internet-savvy people, but nobody in the office had any idea.

So, even though this will probably be my last summer at ICBC, I still want to do my part. The website is at www.illinoiscares.org. Remember that it's a work in progress, but a good cause nevertheless.