My service experience at UNC has been nothing short of phenomenal. Although I was not incredibly involved with service in my freshman year, I was very privileged to have been offered an opportunity to perform a service project in Bolivia in the area of microfinance.
My summer was spent working in a microfinance NGO in Cochabamba, Bolivia called CADEPIA, La Cámara de Pequeñas Industrias y Artisanías. I spent my first few weeks performing a needs-assessment with employees within CADEPIA as well as the micro-entrepreneurs who worked with the organization. My first project had to do with digitizing the digital receipts and records, several hundred new entries of which were being made each day. Traditionally, receipts and records were first hand written on paper and then manually transcribed onto the computer; a very arduous and time-consuming activity. As a computer science double-major, I created several Excel templates and wrote several macros that allowed a loan officer to enter in a client's information and pertinent details and click a button, at which point a digital receipt would automatically be generated and printed for the client's records. This immediately decreased the per-client service time by an order of magnitude.
Next, I noticed that many of the micro-entrepreneurs selling their crafts alongside the streets, competing with one another in what was not healthy competition. In order to remedy this, I organized a city-wide crafts fair where I rented out one of the plazas in the city and brought together all of our micro-entrepreneurs to sell their products. Artisans who produced similar products were located close to one another in the plaza. The week-long fair brought a tremendous amount of revenue to all ...
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...vice Scholars program, I've learned that service is less about the actual work that was done, but more about the motives and the learning that came as a result. I learned that the world was much bigger than myself, and that the greatest good in the world is that of helping those in need. I learned the value of little random acts of kindness and the joy they can bring to those in need. I also learned that when working abroad, it is important to always assume best intentions and to be humble about what you can and cannot do for a community whose culture is completely foreign. While I was in Bolivia, I brought with me Slaughterhouse Five, and I still remember with clarity the section where Vonnegut asks what greater purpose there is to life than to help others live it well. This resonated particularly well with me on the trip and has remained with me ever since.
Selecting to do my service learning at Harvest Hope Food Bank was a very impactful experience. This was so, because of the fact that I have never volunteered at a food bank until now. The organization was able to connect me with the required skills I will practice throughout my career as a professional social worker, therefore better preparing me for assisting clients who may be dependent on my services.
I chose to do my service learning project at Feed My Starving Children. I chose this service learning project because I had prior knowledge and experience by doing it with my family and church. Feed My Starving Children has been a huge impact to those who have participated in this service experience because their mission is to pack meals that go to very hungry children around the world. Being from a single parent family, it is hard for us to not be concerned about where the money for food is coming from, yet we have food on our tables for everyday meals. Therefore, I can’t imagine what it is like for those who experience hunger.
This book in some ways just reminds me that no matter how boring some volunteer work might seem sometimes, it is altruistic in ways we will never understand. Even simple things like handing out water, setting up luminaria bags honoring love ones, or simply playing music for military personnel, veterans and their families reminds me that simply my vision is to help, to be an influence of good. A small amount of your own time can go a long way for someone
I have felt drawn to support and strengthen the communities I am connected to for several years now. Although it took sometime to trace my passion for helping those in need, upon reflection I am able to clearly see a pattern of people, agencies and institutions that provided the additional support I needed to be successful. This support is the primary reason I have chosen the human services profession. From an early age I witnessed how social workers can help those struggling to find the resources they need to foster change.
This last year has definitely been a challenge for me, from new life changes to finishing up my degree. Over the course of my internship that was life changing, also had a positive and negative effects on my life. Despite how it ended it was definitely a lesson learned. I have learned a lot and also more about myself. I know what I wanted in this field and I do seek to get just that. One of the biggest factors at my internship was ethnics. My view of ethnics is different from when I first started my internship. By gaining knowledge and experiences has impacted how I feel and view ethnics. Ethnics is foremost a very important factor when it comes to social work as well in our daily lives. Ethnics are your moral principles of how you view yourself and ours behavior. It’s the differences between right and wrong. Though that is just a basic concept to ethnics, there is so much more to it.
This course has taught me a lot about the role human service workers have in communities and what communities need from human services. I learned about why this type of work is so important and was able to seen that importance first hand through my observation hours at the Dorothy Day Center.
Throughout the fall semester I did community service at a thrift shop and soup kitchen in Lawrence. There I experienced things I have never encountered before in my life. These experiences have taught me a lot, and have truly made me look at America's underprivileged, in a new light.
Many of our people in our society throughout the years, have been buying different types of products and commodities from craft workers that are very personally close with one another and also from smal...
The liberal arts are becoming increasingly rare in schools and universities. However, Saint Catherine University makes it a priority to teach its students the core benefits to the liberal arts college. It requires students to take the course “The Reflective Woman” along with “Global Search for Justice” as an introduction and conclusion to a liberal arts education. Throughout this semester I became more knowledgeable on what the liberal arts truly are, honed my reflective judgment, developed my writing skills, and I now have a deeper and defined sense of self.
In order to fulfill the 12 hours of community service requirement for Nutrition course 139 I applied with five organizations on the approved list. The organization that replied me the fastest was Open Heart Kitchen, they mostly operate in Pleasanton and Livermore areas. Their application and signing up for shift process gives a feeling that this organization is massive, and many individuals really care about the less fortunate. From observation and conversations with the site supervisor, I believe this organization relies on individual donations, small business donations and large corporate donations such as Safeway and Walmart. This organization also relies on volunteers to work every day, they get workers from students fulfilling their hours and resume, individuals fulfilling court orders, and those that just want to help the less fortunate.
The thought of community service was a bore to me before I began my volunteer work. I dreaded starting my community service although I knew I had to do it. Where I earned my hours did not even matter to me. I just wanted to get it over with. To my surprise it was not what I expected. Community service was not a painful experience; it was a very enjoyable and beneficial experience.
“To whom much is given, much is expected.” This quote exemplifies my own personal philosophy on community service. Service is the greatest gift one can return to their community. When an individual takes their personal time and effort to help others in need, it helps progress not only the community they live in, but multiple communities ; ultimately promoting unity and teamwork. People gather together to work towards a common goal: building the people and organizations they are directly and indirectly affected by so that the next generation will be stronger than the previous one. Community service is but is not limited to monetary and material donations, housing reinforcement, neighborhood clean ups. It is as simple as holding a toy drive for
Policies taken by the respective Governments of each and every country in the world are an important aspect of our life whether we choose it or not. Policies are normally adopted to solve major problems faced by the public. It is the duty of the State to see to it that the problems are solved keeping the majority and at the same time ensuring proper justice is done and ethically on the right side of it. So, it is important that there be a public policy and it matters that they need to cater to the majority and aid them by providing solutions to their problems and ensure a smooth functioning of the state. And as a citizen of the nation, public policy matters to me because it provides me a platform to assess the decisions taken by the state on behalf of the nation and with proper knowledge people like us can aid in the betterment of the society by providing inputs or question the policy if it seems improbable.
The concept of citizenship traditionally has two meanings: it both implies legal relationships between a person and a country, thus being close to nationality, and defines a normative ideal of the association with a political community and an active participation in it; while analyzing the attributes of ‘a good citizen’, we mostly deal with the latter. Though it is democracy that enables us to fully exploit the capacities of our citizenship by giving us civil, political and social rights, it itself requires responsible citizens for proper functioning of its institutions. However, more and more people these days prefer to abstain from public life and to pursue private interests, and with the growth of passive citizenship, it is worth asking: what does constitute a good citizen? I believe that a good citizen is a person who never makes a choice between private interests and public activities, but the one whose life is balanced between those two, the one who needs to step outside the close circle to fulfill his life-mission, to realize his potential.
These experiences have afforded me opportunities to demonstrate my gifts and talents that had previously gone undiscovered. Through different community service opportunities, I either learned something new about myself or I was reassured something. These qualities include that I am creative, reliable, open-minded, passionate, and an effective team player. Community service changed my life by developing my character through enhancing my transferable skills, which allowed me to see the world differently. Everyone, from all walks of life, needs to in some way, shape, or form give back to the community because it will not only benefit the less fortunate but it will benefit the volunteers as well. Additionally, I learned about the wide variety of resources available to help the community. There are so many resources out there that people are ignorant to like certain shelters and food banks. Ultimately, community service taught me the greatest gift I could ever receive, how to be