On Martin Luther King Jr Day, I joined thousands of other students across Ohio State in engaging in service opportunities across Columbus to honor Dr. King’s legacy by bettering our community. I always look forward to participating in service opportunities in IA because I often feel that I am stuck in a bubble on campus and engaging in service opportunities outside of campus across Columbus helps me see the real people and diversity of Central Ohio. Before we went off to volunteer, MLK Day of Service began with a program of African American student organizations honoring Dr. King’s legacy and promoting his vision of a diverse and accepting America through incredibly moving performances. These performances, from various choirs and dance groups, displayed the African American struggle and portrayed the importance of diversity and integration in our community and our country.

For our actual service project, our group volunteered at All That, which is a Columbus-based organization that mentors teen in an academic environment to ensure academic success in high school, college and beyond. Our job involved thoroughly cleaning up the building of this facility to ensure that students and mentors would have a clean space to work together and ensure the success of the students involved. It was certainly a new experience for me to wipe, dust and mop the floors more intensively than I’d ever done in my new home! After the project, we met one of the students who had participated in All That and attributed the program to his graduating high school and being able to find a job after college. I realized then that even though our cleaning of this facility seemed small and removed from the actual mission of the organization, if a clean building encourages at-risk students to remain in the All That program, finish their education and pave a career, our service certainly contributed a lot to the community and I was glad to able to be a part of it all.

I volunteered at the Highlights Kids’ Run, which is part of the Columbus Marathon and raises money for the Nationwide Children’s Hospital to find cures for childhood terminal illnesses. Through participating in this event, I truly got a glimpse of the community of Columbus and the people of Columbus outside of those attending Ohio State. As a volunteer, I did many heavy-lifting tasks such as carrying cones and tables around, but more importantly I got to engage with children participating in the race as the volunteers and the participants in the race played Simon Says, Tag and other fun games to excite the children before the actual race. As I ran (or actually, walked) quickly from them to avoid getting tagged, I met children of all races, backgrounds and walks of life and discovered how diverse the Columbus Community actually is. I then got to cheer on all of these children at the race as each age group from the toddlers in the Diaper Dash to the older children, who ran nearly a mile! I was glad that through this opportunity, I was directly able to positively impact Columbus as volunteer of this event.