YoS T&R October 14 Project 1

An experience that has been very eye-opening for me during my second year has been serving at the Clintonville-Beechwold Food Pantry for my Year of Service through the Mount Leadership Society program. Through this project I have learned a lot about what issues people in the community are facing especially during a pandemic. By coming in every week I have gotten to develop a better idea of the needs of people in the community. Furthermore, I have had the opportunity to learn more about the behind the scenes aspects of a food pantry and how it operates which has helped build my knowledge. While this year the interaction with the community members is more limited, this experience has allowed me to make better relationships with the other people who are working at the pantry. To hear how long they have been serving and how much time they put in to helping others has made me realize that the reason these services are available is because of the amount of time they commit to it. My artifact is my first Timesheet and Reflection because it was the first place where I could could write down my thoughts and reflect on my project. In Mount we talk about reflecting on service, which I think is really important to understanding why you are doing service and how it is impacting others. Taking the time after each time I serve to write what I did has helped me to process how what I did is going to help many families. Reflecting on the challenges of the project and what I hope to get out of the project has also been a way for me to think about my service at the site and what I can be doing differently in the future to make a bigger impact. This project has also made me step out of my comfort zone and interact with many new people and learn their stories, which has helped me to understand the significance of the pantry. While it looks like we are just giving food to families, there other resources that the pantry provides that aren’t as well known, so getting to help with these areas as well has made the experience for me more impactful. As I continue to work with the pantry through the rest of the year I hope to learn more of the volunteer’s stories and interact more with the community members when I can. I also hope to gain more knowledge about how the pantry works to help community members in other ways besides just giving food.

Green Columbus Lesson Plan 1

FLOW Lesson Plan 1

A new experience that I have had in the past few months is working on my Legacy Week project with my team. I am a part of Team Environment and one of the lead builders in our group. Through this project, I have learned a lot especially in terms of service project creation. I have never had to create a service project where I am coming up with the details of the event and planning all the steps. In high school, I would sign up for an event and then go to it. I never thought about the process of creating events and all the different things you have to think about to get a project to completion. Through Legacy Week I am learning how to not only create an event but also come up with a lesson plan and thinking of all the details that go along with a project. Legacy Week has impacted me in many ways. It has taught me a new perspective on how I view service projects. I used to only look at it from the point of view of “I am helping somebody who needs it,” but through this project, I have learned that when you go into a project you need to think of how a project helps the group’s needs. The project that you do needs to align with what they need and fulfills their goals not just what you want to do do help. This experience has provided me also with a new understanding of how to approach a service project because there are different steps to follow in order to successfully organize a project starting with talking to agencies, then determining their needs, then coming up with project ideas and finally working on a lesson plan of the event. My artifact is the first part of our lesson plans for the projects our group are creating. I chose this part of our project development because this was the first time where I saw how all the parts of our project development came together. We took all of our brainstorming and created our basic plan of the event and started to come up with a plan of items we had to finish to get the project done. This part of the process showed me how much thought you have to give creating a project and how there is so much more to project development. I hope to gain more knowledge of how to create projects and am able to use these skills in various other areas of my life whether it be through creating more service projects or creating other projects for classes/other jobs in my future.

I have always enjoyed reading and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” was one of the final books I read in my high school English class, but it had a profound impact on my understanding of the world and on my learning. It was written by John Irving and is about two boys and the effect one of them, Owen Meany, had on the other boy throughout his life. It impacted me because it was one book that brought together how people’s actions and beliefs drive them and how it in turn impacts those around them. I selected this book as my artifact because it taught me this lesson and it was one of the few books I read in school that I couldn’t put down and loved reading. I enjoyed reading the book and seeing how John Irving used specific writing styles to to be able to connect every little detail back to one another. He put so much thought into how the book was written to have everything connect. From reading this book, I have learned how sometimes it is the little things that can make a book or your work stand out and have a much bigger impact. This book was also significant for me because it introduced many different topics into one setting such as religion, politics in the 60s and 70s, and normal life of two kids. Reading this book allowed me to apply my knowledge in history and English together to better my understanding of the book. It taught me that there is always a way to connect my learning from various areas of my education to better understand a particular topic. I was able to understand a lot of nuances of “A Prayer for Owen Meany” because I knew the history and politics that was integral to the story. In the future, I want to be able to connect my learning in various areas of study to have a more well-rounded understanding of whatever I’m doing and how it impacts others.