On April 25, 2013, I attend Stockton’s Celebration of Service. I originally thought that this event was going to have tables and tables of students wishing to display their service efforts in the past semester. I was rather surprised to find that there were only a handful of service projects being displayed. The area by the library where the Celebration of Service was occurring was rather bare, and I was disappointed to see that not a lot of students wanted to share their projects.  I give a lot of credit to those students who were willing to display their hard work and efforts and I applaud them for their generous efforts in trying to make the community a better place.

One of the projects that caught my eye was called Clean Ocean Action. Clean Ocean Action is a project involving the cleaning up of the oceans after Hurricane Sandy. Anything that involves the revival of the shores after the hurricane immediately grabs my attention. The students that were running this project asked me to fill out a brief survey. The survey asked me questions regarding the beach I attend and how it has been affected by Sandy. It also asked me if I have been turned away from my beach due to the ruins of the shore after the devastating hurricane. The survey also asked how much I would be willing to donate, time or money, in order to help revive our shores. A bribe to filling out the survey was that you are actually put into raffle to win a free gift basket! The boys were giving out free bumper stickers to help raise awareness of this particular issue which is extremely relevant to a lot of our daily lives.

After having attended Celebration of Service, I was really disappointed that my roommate and I didn’t display our Jersey Strong Tee Shirt project. I think this would have stood out amongst the projects that were displayed and would have really caught people’s eyes. If we decide to continue working with this project, maybe we will document our efforts at next year’s Celebration of Service!