Parks, Foodies, & Opportunities

Whew. One week left of SOS. We're at the final stretch, and I'm feeling fairly stretched out myself. This past week has been an interesting wrap-up of sorts, where all of the projects finished up (in preparation for "close-out week"). Since Heads Up concluded last week, Blue 3 has jumped around DC a bit this week. Our week began at the playground, where we left our mark, making everything clean, shiny, and new. It was a hot day again, but the participants were troopers; I was happy to be able to bring them indoors for the following three days.

Capital Area Food Bank was our next stop from Tuesday through Thursday. I think this has been one of my favorite projects of MSOS so far. You get to move around and work together in one area, and being able to see the progress you've made in just a day is motivating. We had two objectives: sort food that's been donated into catagories, and package food items within each category to be shipped to the warehouse area. The area we worked in contained many cages that were labeled by catagory: canned meats, condiments, snacks, rice and pasta, etc. Whereas a few different groups came in at various hours during our three days there, our team was certainly the full-time crew in a sense, so it was nice to be able to come in on Wednesday and Thursday and just get right to work. We got a lot done: 20,000 lbs of food was sorted and packaged. It certainly felt like an accomplishment, and I hope the participants felt the same.

Coincidentally, this happened to be the same food bank I volunteered at a year and a half ago during my college's Alternative Spring Break Trip, so I was fortunately already familiar with the project. It was great showing our participants how a food bank works, and also learning a lot myself about how efforts against poverty and hunger are being made on a daily basis. There is so much to be done, and getting food sorted and packaged allows the process of obtaining more donations and giving out more food more efficient. The more people volunteer, the more others can benefit from the food bank. One of our participants in particular really enjoyed working there this week, and I was excited to hear from him that he would love to come back to volunteer.

Another exciting note: The Washington Post came by on Thursday to do a story on young volunteers at the food bank. Our volunteer coordinator asked if our team would be interested in being interviewed. We were, of course, and a couple of our participants and I were interviewed. I'm interested to see how it turns out; it seems they took a lot of photos, which should be online and published at some point. I may include that here once I hear news about it.

Our participant week concluded with a visit to the University of Maryland, where we introduced our participants to a great speaker, who happened to be a former professor of one of the crew leaders. The day was filled with presentations on AmeriCorps NCCC, Peace Corps, Job Corps, and City Year. We were even able to score a tour of the Comcast Center, where the Terrapins play, in addition to many concerts and events each year.

...a solid week, I'd say. It feels like its been two weeks, and in a sense, there's been more of a condensing than a stretching of To-Do's. But our last to-do is this week, during their close-out. It seems most of it is up in the air, so I look forward to bring it down to earth in my next entry...