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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
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