Samuel Connery                                                                                                                                               Blog Post #1

Professor Lenard                                                                                                                                             9/14/15

The day of service was quite the interesting experience.  When I had first signed up for it back in the summer I had assumed that the day was going to be filled with working on small projects throughout the day to give to the people who are less fortunate.  Rather the day was mostly filled with sitting through presentations on different services that are offered as clubs at the school or the surrounding area.  This provided an interesting opportunity to find a service club that was best suited for me.

Out of all the presentations that I saw, I believe Green Dot was the most intriguing to me.  Green Dot in an organization that encourages people to stop potentially dangerous situations, known as red dots, by having someone intervene in some form either through words or actions.  The people who were intervening and trying to help the situation were known as the green dots.  The speaker had helped me realize that there were situations that I’ve encountered in my own life that I could have helped make better through stepping in.  In order to help in these situations, the organization needs more people to become aware of how to become a green dot so that there’s a better chance that they will be there to stop a red dot.  This group teaches people the proper way to intervene in dangerous situations so they can help defuse the situations.

Although the day was mainly filled with presentations, there was one activity during the day that actually made me feel like I was actively helping others.  The name of the group was Books without Borders, which is an organization that collects books to give to people in other areas that have a hard time accessing books.  The organization had us actively work by unloading boxes of books from their vans and then categorize them into subjects and from there repackage the books in other boxes.  The process made me feel that I was putting my time to good use at the day of service, and it was also the kind of thing that I was expecting the day of service to be.  Since there was a large amount of people that had signed up for the Day of Service the club was able to get many hours of hard work which they wouldn’t have if they had just worked with the members of their club.  I felt this Day of Service was extremely valuable to this club just because of the amount of work that we were able to help them finish in such a short amount of time.

Above all, I believe that the Day of Service was a valuable source of information to learn about different community service groups around the school.  Next year I hope that the Day of Service has more active projects, such as making care packages.  I do now feel that I have a better understanding of the community service opportunities here at Stockton and hope to get involved with at least on sometime soon.