Way back on September 15, 2015, I participated in my first tabling event. Tabling is essentially setting up a table in a popular location and grabbing people’s attention. The purpose of this event was to recruit blood donors for a blood drive that occurred over the course of the next two days. Two other honors students and great friends of mine, Jake G. and Anthony G., accompanied me in this event which proved to be both more fun and more successful than we had pictured it to be.
Our goal with tabling was to promote the blood drive and encourage people to sign up and donate. Dr. Kosick, who ran the tabling, hopped to have 95 donors on each of the two days the drive took place. People on campus are busy, and no one will willingly come to ask about our cause. In order to gain donors we had to work on our public speaking skills and talk students and faculty into at least checking out our table. If they were willing to donate, which many were, we explained to them the height and weight requirements needed to donate and other information about time and locations. Another successful tactic for promoting the blood drive was to walk around all of the cafeteria tables asking people to sign up and donate. If the tables were vacant we left a flyer on it for the next person(s) to use the table to see. We didn’t end up quite reaching our goal of 95 per day, but we gathered almost a full list for one day and about half for the next day.
This experience benefitted us as volunteers while helping the blood drive. We practiced and gained experience with public speaking. Approaching people isn’t always easy, especially when you’re trying to get something out of them. It take a skillful rhetoric to persuade someone who is undecided to make them sign up. However, it was all for a good cause. Donating blood can help many people with various need and conditions. One surprising fact is that donating blood is actually beneficial to the health of the donor. By giving blood the risk of heart disease. They are far less likely to experience a heart attack and the risk of any other type of cardiovascular problem is decreased by about a third. The theory, according to studies by researchers of the American Journal of Epidemiology, is “that iron has a significant impact on atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. When you give blood you are removing 225 to 250 milligrams of iron from your system, thus cutting your risk of heart disease.” There are also the more obvious benefits of helping those in need of donated blood.

Books Without Borders is a club at Stockton that I am currently committed to. This club takes on the simple idea of providing libraries in need with the recycled literature we collect from donors. The clubs current goal is to fill a massive shipping crate to the brim with boxes of books to be shipped to libraries that require them, essentially in a foreign country. The jobs of club members varies from raising awareness of those who are not fortunate enough to access a plethora of books in their libraries to organizing donated books into categories, such as biology, chemistry, children’s books, novels etc. Donations need to be organized in these categories for ease of shipping, economic use of space in the shipping container, and to make sure people get the right categories of books.
I was introduced to the club at Day of Service 2015 where our president had volunteers organizing books into categories in such a way as I previously described. However, we also were featured as a club in a more recent event called Make a Difference Day. This day was compiled with multiple organizations doing hands on volunteer service. On this day we accomplished the organization of books that were causing donation boxes to overflow. After they were organized we trucked them to the shipping crate where we then organized the books in the crate and added our new boxes for the day.
This is a great organization with friendly people who put in effort towards helping others and making our club a family. We have movie nights, banquets, and are going to Philadelphia as a club to bond this coming Saturday. During our meetings every Tuesday we discuss events such as this, new ideas for fundraisers, and our ultimate goal of shipping out the books. This club also provides me with extracurricular activities to counter the boring time off that accumulates on campus and as a source of bonding with new and current friends.

Saturday, September 12th I was reluctant to arise for a full day of service learning. Lacking sleep and motivation, as most college students are, I rolled out of bed for free breakfast. My buddies and I all joined the red team and waited anxiously to be informed as to what we would be accomplishing that day. After keynote speaker Todd Bernstein got us committed to participating in the activities we were assigned to aid Books Without Borders. In this segment we physically aided Books Without Borders in unloading, sorting, and repackaging books for donation. We were informed about their goal of donating recycled books to school libraries that are less fortunate than most. I eventually ended up signing up for the club at the Get Involved Fair.
Our next station is where I experienced service learning for the first time here at Stockton, or maybe in my life. Excepting to accomplish labor-based tasks I was caught off guard by the servicer learning portions of the day. However, after thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that service learning is more beneficial to the community than one-and-done volunteer opportunities. I could tell many people were bored by the lectures, but they didn’t understand that if everyone was informed of things, such as why it’s better to drink from a refillable container and not bottled water, or that they have to ability to impact their environment through speaking their opinion, writing letters to government officials, and voting, then no one would have to provide service hours as a special event. These services would be completed naturally by citizens if they were informed and motivated. For example, roadside cleanups would become less necessary if people converted to the use of refillable containers.
As an environmentalist I’ll admit that hearing from Water Watch and a representative from the sustainable farm were my favorite lectures. However, I also felt that the Green Dot spokesman was trying to teach an important message. That is that if oneis a bystander to an event, such as seeing someone pocket goods from a supermarket, or are witness to domestic abuse, it is the job of said bystander to speak up and take action. It may be hard to approach the situation without support of others to take a stand, but taking action can take many forms, such as calling the authorities, getting the attention of other bystanders, or intervening through rhetoric rather than physical contact. Unfortunately there are “red dots” out there, but the number of people who are bystanders and take action, or green dots, against this one person can make a huge difference.
Whether everyone at Day of Service enjoyed the service learning or not, we hope that they at least gained knowledge from it. Every bit of service learning helps; such as the bettering of one’s knowledge about drinking from a reusable water bottles. Day of Service helped to shape Stockton as a community. We all got to know more about one another and gained service opportunities. When this knowledge is put to work it will benefit our community as a whole