Skip to main content

Civic Engagement Hours (Junior Year)

Over my junior 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 junior year. For this school year, I have completed these hours at a few different locations. The first is Elgin's Hope for the Holidays from the fall, and up until now, Chicago Wildlife Watch. In this post, I will talk about the service work I did and my experience with it.


Elgin's Hope for the Holidays

Leading up to the holiday season of 2021, I participated in a toy drive in Elgin, Illinois. This toy drive was being run by the Salvation Army and I was able to attend because of a family member who works with them. This event works by families signing up to get toys for their children by the time of Christmas for free if they need to. Toys that have been donated by citizens of the community and event organizers can be looked through and individually selected so parents can choose which toys their child gets. These orders would be printed out and service participants can use them to find the toys that are being requested. If someone wanted to get their son and daughter a few toys they could choose for each child to get one big toy, two small toys, and pajamas or socks. I took a few requests that were similar to this example one. I found it very nice that the Salvation Army was running this event because every child deserves to get a toy and some clothing for the holidays. It also felt good to help families that cannot purchase the toys on their own and can benefit from the drive. This is something I would do again in the future for next year's toy drive or at any point in the year.


Chicago Wildlife Watch

Chicago Wildlife Watch is one of many projects on an online platform utilizing people-powered research. This platform is called Zooniverse. CWW focuses on using trail cameras placed in the Chicago area to identify animals such as squirrels, coyotes, dogs, birds, deer, and more. The website gives you an image and you can search around for any animals. If you find any you can identify them from the list of options which tells you basic information about the animals. This includes what they look like, their size, and where they can be located. These cameras are motion-triggered and are placed at more than 100 sites. Identifying these animals helps determine which species are present and assesses spatial and long-term patterns in wildlife communities. This will help the experts with their studies and know-how to conserve wildlife in the best way possible. Using the data from the cameras, the experts can get an idea of how the different species are doing and if they are in trouble. While I was participating in this, I found many animals that were sometimes alone or in groups. I also identified some humans as well. This is a pretty useful tool to help out because you can do it from your own home and I enjoyed it. Sometimes, the cameras are triggered at night which shows the photo in black and white and it can be difficult to tell animals apart from one another. From the time I have spent working with CWW, I hope I made a good contribution to their studies. 

Chicago Wildlife Watch website when identifying animals
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Snapshots of Memories

For Final Presentations this term I am presenting the GCE Minecraft server. The GCE Minecraft server is a multiplayer world on Minecraft where me and a fellow freshman have built GCE. Since we were not able to conclude our school year at GCE and it being the last year at the current location, we decided to make a replica in Minecraft. During the terms pre-apocalypse a few GCE students took interest in creating multiplayer Minecraft worlds like surviving as a group to beat the game and even building a massive city. As we moved through the weeks after GCE closed its doors the students continued to play and collaborate with each other. One of these students came up with the idea of building GCE. I agreed to do it because I have a passion for Minecraft and have become an architect on it just like the creators that I take inspiration from. When there is something you enjoy, do more of it. So, in the mindset of the Final Presentations for this term and having a little bit of fun we sta...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spilling Into Something Else

Welcome back to my blog! This post is for the first Action Project of the Humanities class, Equality. In this first unit, we have learned about equality and how to reach an egalitarian society. We also dove into intersectionality, sociology, and social stratification. We started reading There There  by Tommy Orange, a novel following the stories of Native American characters in Oakland grappling with a complex and painful history and identity. With the idea of creating zines for our Action Project, we had multiple Field Experiences that gave us a chance to observe and study all kinds of zines. These FEs include looking at the zine collection in the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, Co-Prosperity artist space and gallery to investigate underground and independent media, and Howling Pages Comics, where the owner promotes zines created by young people and small press or independent comics. This Action Project asks us to choose a historical event that exemplifies...
Post a Comment
Read more

My 24 Hour Woodworking Challenge

Welcome back to my blog! This post is for the first Action Project of the Humanities class, Endurance. In this class, we have been learning what it means to endure. We looked through history to see moments where humans endured, such as Ernest Shackleton's survival in the Antarctic and the Holocaust, while we read the book Night by Elie Wiesel. We also introduced small challenges we would have to endure, like holding an ice cube in our hand for as long as possible. For this Action Project, we have been tasked with committing 24 hours to a challenge with a clear mission and guiding question. My mission for this AP was to build and improve my woodworking skills and create something that is important to me. My guiding question was, what is the best bridge I can build? For 24 hours, I worked toward creating a wooden bridge by myself with only a small amount of woodworking experience behind me. While working, I recorded my progress by taking photos and filming time-lapses. The video belo...
Post a Comment
Read more