Many can agree that giving back to the community is a very rewarding thing to do in your spare time. After seeing the first poster for Day of Service, I pre-registered right away. I was excited to see the different volunteer activities that were planned for that day. This was my first Day of Service so it was all new to me. There were different organizations within and even outside of the school itself, Alpha Lambda Delta, Active Minds, and Books Without Borders to name a few. With a high number of volunteers, we were split into groups by the color of our name tag. Each group had roughly 80 people. I thought this was interesting and a smart thing to do although some people already knew this was how things were done. Therefore, they made sure their friends had the same color they did when getting the name tags to begin with. Either way, it was still a good thing to be able to meet new people being in such a large group overall.

One activity that stood out to me was with Alpha Lambda Delta. They were focusing on educating about cerebral palsy. All of the volunteers made ribbons for cerebral palsy awareness. It was during their presentation that I learned about the Field of Dreams which is a local organization that gets kids with any disability, not just cerebral palsy, out on the baseball field to play a game. Each person has someone with them to help them along throughout the game. It seems like it would be a great experience for everyone involved. I made sure to take down information for them in order to volunteer. I’m sure I couldn’t have been the only one interested in the Field of Dreams. In my opinion, Alpha Lambda Delta had a powerful message and made some people realize a few things about cerebral palsy that they didn’t know before. There are also people within Alpha Lambda Delta that either have a form of cerebral palsy or are closely affected by it through relatives. This made their message even better because they could relate and tell you first hand the different things that go on in someone’s life with cerebral palsy.

What seemed to be liked by a lot of people was packaging meals. I personally agree with this. On the way to this specific volunteer activity I really didn’t know what to expect. I mean packaging meals, obviously. However, I had never done this. I didn’t know how it happened or what was being packaged. When we got to the activity, gloves and hair nets were given out in order to not contaminate the food. At this point, I knew it was a legitimate thing and we were about to package a lot of meals. People dispersed to different stations of the food packaging and where you were determined your team. Each person had an important job in order to sufficiently pack meals. The music played and we began. The feeling of working in a group to do something for the greater good of people is just an amazing feeling. Every time we reached 1,000 meals packaged a gong was hit. This just fueled everyone even more. By the end, the group I was in made 13,000 packaged meals. All of the groups combined made about 45,000 meals to give to the hungry. That’s absolutely mind boggling to me that groups of college students were able to make such a great impact on the world.  

The Day of Service is definitely something I will continue to participate in at my time here at Stockton. I encourage everyone to do so as well; it’s a great experience.