Community Service, England

Community volunteering has always been a part of my life, my parents are volunteer EMTs, and I’ve been part of a thing called Service-Learning since I was in sixth grade. So, getting in ten hours of community service wasn’t a big deal for me, actually, I accidentally went a little overboard and ended up with about twenty-five!

I started my volunteer hours organizing choir students from the group out of Ozark Christian College “Highest Praise” with host families in Campo for their concert held here in June. We hosted some of them at my house, and the concert was great! Learn more by checking out this blog!

The second volunteer project I worked on was another thing I help with every summer, the Annual Campo Clean-Up Day. Every local person available wakes up at the crack of dawn and works until almost sundown doing things like mowing, trimming trees, raking, painting, and making our town more beautiful. This year was as successful as ever, and my specific project was helping clean-up the local outdoor tennis and basketball courts. I ended the day much as everyone else; tired, sun-burned, and smiling!

The next project was the 27th (I think it was) annual Quick Response Team Sale/Volunteer Firemen’s Auction. As I said, my parents and sister are EMTs, and my dad is the volunteer fire chief, so I always get to help out, but this year, I got a little extra responsibility. I spent several hours going through the boxes and boxes of donated stuff (I will not call it junk…I will not call it junk…I will not…just kidding, it’s actually pretty amazing what we find—some pretty cool stuff)! On the day of the sale, I created a re-useable spreadsheet to keep track of all the people bidding and how much each person’s bill was. This also helped us come up with an approximate figure of how much money was raised before we even counted the money! I finished up that part of my volunteering by writing this article!

My next (and probably largest) volunteer project was helping to organize and advertise the annual Campo Watermelon Festival. I created a Facebook page for the festival, helped create flyers for individual events and the main event flyer, as well as the grand schedule of events. I also got to help be in charge of creating a scavenger hunt with questions about local histories and mysteries, with a few challenges thrown in like “perform a song and dance to a children’s tune”. The festival was held on August 14th, and was a huge success. Check out more photos here and here!

Above: This picture is myself and some friends having some fun in the sun on the giant slip'n'slide at the festival. (I'm on the far right). Above: Here we are tallying up scares for the annual scavenger hunt (again, I'm on the far right facing away from the camera)

The final big volunteer project I worked on was spending two nights working concessions at Baca County’s historic movie theater, “The Capital”. (Point of interest-the Capital Theater will be featured in the public service announcements mentioned here) I’d never worked at a theater before, so that was a new and fun experience, and I’m now on the official list of volunteers, so if you ever go to the movies in Springfield, Colorado…keep an eye out for me! To see the movies that were showing while I worked, check out this blog!

So folks, there you have it! The majority of my 10 hours plus of community service as a 2010 Ogallala Commons intern! Check out my next blog as I will be wrapping up my internship with a final reflection!