Civic Engagement Hours (Freshman Year)

Over my freshman school year, I have been working on obtaining civic engagement hours. At the start of the year, I was told that I need 200 hours of civic engagement to graduate from GCE. I was asked to try and complete at least 50 of these hours in my freshman term. For this school year, I have completed these hours at two different locations. The first would be Misericordia which offers the potential to persons with developmental disabilities and who is physically challenged. The second place I gained the rest of my civic engagement hours was at Sunshine Gospel Ministries. In this blog post, I will talk about the organization and what I did to help and gain my required hours.

Misericordia

When I was volunteering at Misericordia Home which is in northern Chicago I spent my time in the bakery and shipping area. The majority of my civic engagement hours came from volunteering at Misericordia which would be a total of 38. When working in the bakery I would be cutting brownies and putting them into boxes or tins, labeling bread, and a few other jobs. Before my freshman year, I had volunteered in the bakery and other places at Misericordia Home such as the laundry area. At the bakery, there were mainly volunteers but sometimes I was able to see some of the residents spending some time there. When doing my volunteering I would talk to the residents, the other volunteers, and the supervisors as well. As I spent more and more time there I began to communicate with more people and being able to recognize and become friends with the supervisors was very nice. The Misericordia bakery produces baked goods that are sold to people who want to take some large orders for their business or to someone who sees their truck on the street and wants a few cookies to take home. The profits from this go to improving the living quality and care for the residents. After the first couple of times that I volunteered the supervisors just let me go to one of the open stations that needed a volunteer to help out without finding a job for me. I had worked in all of the different stations before and it was clear that I had some skill in some of those areas. The job I was best at and possibly the most recognizable for was labeling bread. Many different loaves of bread are made in the Misericordia bakery and they each needed a name label and an ingredient label. I was very efficient at this job and rarely needed another volunteer to help me with the labeling. Towards the end of my volunteering at Misericordia, I worked in the shipping area. When doing some work in shipping I would mainly be creating larger boxes and packaging the baked goods into them. Occasionally I would be asked to help load a truck but that was not as often. I enjoyed spending a good amount of hours at Misericordia and I could have spent a few more but on a few days, I was too worn out for a full 7 hour day of working and had to work for only 2. I would have loved to continue volunteering to complete the rest of the hours that I was asked to complete for my freshman year but there is only a small amount of time that volunteering is available. All of the 38 hours of my volunteering was done by myself and I wish I was able to be with a few of my school friends but never had the opportunity to do that. Of course, I couldn't spend 7 hours without talking to anyone and I was glad to make some friends with the supervisors that I would see from week to week. At the end of my volunteering, I was given a gift basket by the supervisors and I was really grateful to have received this. I was told that I was welcome anytime to volunteer and help out even without signing up for days of volunteering. The supervisors were all very nice and I am very grateful to have spent time with them. They were always interested to learn about GCE and what I was doing in my classes. I will continue to volunteer at Misericordia Home and I will be very happy to see the supervisors again. I always told them I would be back after every day of volunteering and I am going to do as many hours possible next year.

A few of the supervisors and myself on the last day of volunteering

Sunshine Gospel Ministries

For the final 12 hours needed to complete my assignment of 50 this year I volunteered at Sunshine Gospel Ministries. I will also be spending more time working here to add to the 200 hours needed to graduate high school. Sunshine Gospel Ministries is a church in Woodlawn of Chicago that is helping people get food and supplies during our current global pandemic situation. I heard about this from one of my friends in a higher grade at GCE. When volunteering here I and other people helped unload a truck that had lots of food supplies and milk. We set up a couple areas where we could distribute the packages to people that needed them. The first was in the building itself where people who were walking up and wanted to take some food could get it and the second was for people that were driving to pick up supplies. I worked at the driving station and assisted with pulling boxes of food and milk crates out of the truck and also putting some of the supplies in the cars. Most of the people driving were single families that needed some produce but some people were taking a couple orders for people that could not get the care packages themselves. We worked outside of the church unloading the truck and loading up the passing cars until we ran out of supplies. Recently we followed this process and eventually were out of food packages. One thing we did still have was around a few hundred gallons of milk that we had nothing to do with. So, to completely run out of our stock we started to give away free milk to people that didn't have to sign up. We stationed ourselves on the main road and began to give away free milk to people going down the sidewalks or driving in their cars and it was very successful. It wasn't long until we ran out of milk and were done with volunteering for the day. The organization will continue to run these through the summer and I will volunteer with them and some GCE friends to be moving during the summer and help people that are not in the best position to get food supplies.

Unloading the truck with some GCE students