Service-Learning Project Report: Neighborhood Cleanup

For my service-learning project I did, was neighborhood cleanup on Sunday 10/13/2019. I chose this event because it was the only one that worked with my school/work schedule. As a student, I was interested in helping an UWM. I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to get involved with UWM and to serve and support our community. Not only that but it was a great opportunity to explor around MKE and learn more about the surrounding community. As someone whose family has had to utilize community based programs in the past, such as food banks and emergency shelters, I appreciate the efforts and passion that people involved with UWM are putting into their community outreach programs, It shows that we all care about our community and we are ready to make a impact towards are community. The service-learning project was straight forward.

All I had to was go out to the community and follow the map that our leader gave us and go to our specific route in order to pick up trash and recycling items and separate them accordingly around UWM. The first thing I did when getting to the meet up location was to sign in and get into groups of six. After that we read the directions, appoint a leader within our group, grab our material, and then headed out to pick up trash. The objective was to pick up trash and to clean up the community, our duty/goal of the service leaning, was to serve the community around us and to make it better. We aimed to serve the community around us as well as the UWM community. The project first started as a small task but then devolved into something bigger that people who are walking, driving, even biking around will notice the cleanliness of the surrounding community. I feel like our group met the objective with a good degree and we did everything in our power to clean up the community.

I like volunteering and by doing it, I discover so much about an organization and their mission for the community. My duty was to carry one of the trash bags and helpout the person picking up the trash to sort it into the right bag. I really didn’t get time to talk to the facilitator of the program to ask about other day were we can come back and do volunteering, but I do know that the office is always open for me to stop by and ask for more opportunities to improve my community. My thoughts over the day was, “it’s too cold to pick up trash and recycling” but because we did it as a group, it made it better! I felt like I was making a small impact to the surrounding community by doing so we had several different people saying, “Thank you for picking up the trash”, while we were out there. This made my day 100 times better and it felt good that people apricated our work. Volunteering overall is something that as people we should do more often. It helps not only us, but it also helps of community, we all have the power to make someone’s day and it important to give back to the community that does so much for all of us. I am a firm believer in the notion that each individual has the ability to create changes in the community around them. Making even a small impression can change a person’s day, and possibly even change a child’s perception of their future. Every individual has the power to make a difference, even if it’s a small difference.

I feel like this tie into what we are learning in class because it connects to future thing we will be doing as adults, big companies, even small ones make an effort to make a change and go out to volunteer to help the surrounding communities, they volunteer, give scholarships, go out and interact with people. During the event we had to set up roles for our group. Our first step was to have a leader, and then from there we set roles on who would be picking up trash and the recycling and we also had to have people holding the trash bags. Everyone contributed to the “event/service project” and we were able to get it done as quickly as possible. We communicated throughout the project in order to be more efficient and it was easy, everyone had roles set up witch made it easy to handle everything, and we made sure to the split up and concurred more ground in order to be done quicker. The leader was in charge of calling the shots in order for us to pick up the pace and or if we forgot to clean an area. The end result was so satisfying, and I know that we were able to help support and provide some sort of relief for so many families around the community.

We really did not have any other student other than UWM students helping us or interacting with us. Everyone who was helping that day were associated with UWM which made it much more easier to communicate with them. We all had fun, played jokes with each other and made the day count as one of the good memories to look back at. I was able to meet a lot of new people, which was great! I wasn’t really surprise about anything while doing the project, it was straight forward, and we got it done early too. After an hour and a half, we cleaned up about a block near UWM and it was a good time. The best part about it, was that I got to meet new UWM student and make new friends while making an impact in my community. Working to improve the lives of others and the community around us is often noted as one of the most remarkable ways to improve one’s own life to create change within our community.

Service Learning is defined as a teaching and learning method that allows students to integrate with the community and to their surroundings. It is an idea to learn, experience and improve oneself while interacting with others and the community such as UWM. Through this experience, we can acknowledge different perspectives, values and diversities between two countries. the overall experience was great, and I will continue to do community service to make an impact on my community. I liked that I got a chance to connect with other UWM students while making a difference. I learned that UWM does a great job to get more and more students involve to the surrounding community in order for us as students to fell more integrated to our UWM community.