The Movement

Hey everyone! My name is Geoff and I’d like to talk to you about my personal experience in my Service-Learning Course. Before I begin, I think it’s important that I reveal I’ve volunteered at several different organizations before this, so I can’t share with you a story about how it inspired me to start volunteering or anything like that. But I can tell you this- it gave me a perspective on community service and volunteering that I don’t think I would have encountered if I hadn’t taken this course. I used to put school and volunteering in two totally different realms. I did my schoolwork and homework during some days, and volunteered on others. I never thought that volunteerism could be combined with academic study. When I read the course description, I thought it was interesting how a class could combine English Composition with Volunteering. This is what originally inspired me to take this course. When I was presented with a list of different organizations I could request to volunteer with, I was a bit intimidated. I understood that I would have to work with this organization and write about it for the remainder of the course, which was about 16 weeks, so this was a pretty big decision. Thankfully, my instructor made this decision easier for us by asking us to not only pick 2-3 organizations we’d like to work with, but explain WHY we’d like to work with them. This assignment made me think critically about my choice and helped me to come up with good reasons for volunteering at different organizations and serving different causes.

 

I requested to work with the homeless shelter for a few different reasons. To begin with, in all my volunteering experiences I had never worked with the homeless community. Furthermore, the city where I attend school (Tallahassee) has an above average homeless population. I’m the type of person where if I see a problem, I want to help fix it. Constantly seeing homeless individuals and families while exploring my new home motivated me to want to serve this population. Thankfully these reasons worked out well for me and I was placed in the volunteer group for The Shelter, along with two other girls in my class. I was surprised to find that The Shelter was only half a mile from my residence, or about a 10-minute walk. This made my volunteering experience a lot easier since it was in close proximity of where I lived and was easy to get back and forth to. Although this might be a challenge, if it’s possible to volunteer at a place close to where you live, it will make transportation a lot easier and will also make you feel a lot better about the whole experience because you will be helping your immediate community. Different assignments I encountered in this course required me to closely analyze my experience and put how I felt and what I saw during my volunteer experience into words. I was required to write a research paper about homelessness, develop ways of helping The Shelter, interview homeless individuals, and more. These assignments helped me to engage myself in the organization and made writing lengthy papers easy. Being able to use my personal experiences and primary information in my assignments made completing these assignments fun and unique, since most projects and research papers require you to use other people’s information. This experience in general showed me that volunteering is more than just giving back or helping others, it truly is a LEARNING experience. I encourage all students to look for service learning opportunities in their respective schools and go into them with an open mind. Classes like this one will go far beyond a whiteboard and will show you how your efforts can make an impact in your local community and in some cases on an even larger scale. Through this course I made new connections, learned ways to speak to others, and taught me that everyone has a unique life story that can teach me something about myself. I will always look for new ways to combine academia and volunteerism now that I know how to better associate the two.