Building a Legacy

During our first year as Mount Scholars, our main project of the year is Mount Legacy Week. For this project, we split up into 6 focus groups: Education, Health, Poverty, Environment, Global, and Abuse. This year, I had the honor of working team global. Our task was to create 3 service projects from scratch that would uphold the Mount family legacy in our community.

We spent a few months brainstorming possible ideas and agencies to work with for our projects and landed on Prezens, Ethiopian Tewahedo Social Services (ETSS), and the Ronald McDonald House Charities. Our team split into 3 sub-groups in order to better focus on each project. I was a member of the Ronald McDonald House Charities team.

Our project concept was to spend two nights at the Ronald McDonald House in downtown Columbus interacting with the families there and creating thoughtful cards to send to families residing in other Ronald McDonald Houses around the world in countries such as Colombia, New Zealand, China, and Germany. We provided translations of inspirational quotes in each language as well as fun facts about the culture in each country. We enjoyed getting to sit and talk to the residents and hear their stories. It was so fun getting to hear from people who have traveled across the country to receive the top notch care from Nationwide Children’s Hospital. We brought smiles to their faces, they brought smiles to ours, and our hopes are that theses cards will bring smiles to the faces of those going through a difficult time across the world.

Mount Legacy Week was a humbling experience to say the least. It showed just how much we really can do to impact our community when we come together–not just in Columbus, OH, but around the world.