Week 5:
Starting to Wind Down

August 16, 2016

Last week started off a little bit stressful. I had successfully scheduled the community service activity for the Hyde Park Academy students at the Lakeview Food Pantry. After talking with many people at Project Rousseau, finalizing the details and making sure everything was okay to move forward, I received an email from Beth informing me that the location would be too far away for students. This felt like a big step backwards, as the final, “can’t wait to start and meet the students” email had been sent out. However, since the location did not work, I sent an email back to the coordinator for the Lakeview Food Pantry, apologizing for the inconvenience, and explaining that this opportunity would not indeed be a feasible choice for our students.

This exercise taught me a few lessons. It taught me that not everything is going to work out and that things fall through, and even if they do, that is okay. It is common and acceptable for plans to not work out, and for things to be cancelled last-minute.

Because of this community service opportunity falling through, I needed to find a new community service opportunity as soon as possible. I asked Beth to clarify what criteria she needed me to fulfill for the community service activities to help ensure that my choice of back-up site would not be a mismatch like the first.

After receiving that clarification, I started searching the internet for alternative opportunities for the students. I was mainly looking for nursing homes or assisted living facilities. Once I found a substantial number of them, I created a spreadsheet of all the different locations. On this spreadsheet I put the name of the opportunity, a brief description of what the students would be doing, the website, the address and how long it would take to get to and from HPA. Once this was complete, I sent it to Beth for approval and to get the go ahead to email some of the opportunities I found.

Once that was done, I started emailing each of the opportunities and awaited responses. I finally heard back from Montgomery Place Assisted Living on Friday. Unfortunately, when I received the email, it was after the workday had ended. I had to wait until Monday the 15^th to hear back from my contact.

This week has taught me a lot about patience. I learned a lot about my lack of patience and how I get anxious when things don’t go as planned or happen immediately. I learned that it is okay for things to take time, and in fact, most things in life do not happen right away. I also learned that even though one door closes, another one opens or can be opened. At first, I felt very anxious and nervous about finding another community service opportunity for the students, I didn’t think I would be able to do it in such a short amount of time.

As much as I personally love volunteering at food pantries and helping people in that sense, I believe volunteering in an assisted living facility will benefit the students more than bagging up and preparing food for families. In the assisted living facility they will have face to face interactions with people, and be able to witness how much they can help someone, even if it’s just sitting down and having a conversation. They will see how something that seems so common, can really impact a persons life.

This week has also taught me a lot about flexibility. I believe I have become a lot more flexible through this process. I have learned that your first opportunity won’t always be the best and won’t always work out, what is important is how you deal with it and move forward.

I look forward to getting in touch with my contact at Montgomery Place and am hopeful that this opportunity will work out for the best.