What is the Public Works of Reading?
On Monday, February 4th the Green Team met up with our project coordinator, Mrs. Laura Cordero, to discuss the details of our project. Mrs. Cordero is the Outreach and Education Coordinator for the City of Reading. The first part of our meeting was learning about the Public Works system. Mrs. Cordero told us that the Public Works strives to build, maintain, and operate the public infrastructure in a way that protects the environment and preserves the city for future generations. In a day, the Public Works can deal with anything from graffiti removal to fixing traffic lights. Mrs. Cordero specifically deals with teaching students about the Public Works and how they can play a role in helping the environment. With being new to Reading, this is her first project with Penn State Berks. After the brief overview, she dove right into what our service opportunities would be.
What are our service responsibilities?
As a team, we will be doing community clean-ups as a part of our 8-hour service requirement. We are going to work with an independent task force called South of Penn, who organizes monthly clean-ups throughout the city. We have a total of three weekend clean-ups in March and April. Over the course of the next two months, we will be working together with the community to clean up Reading as much as we can. On top of the field work, we will be doing other research and projects to help South of Penn, since this organization is a non-profit we will be doing whatever we can to assist the group in its needs. Whether that is creating media-marketing posts for them to upload in the future, surveying the residents of Reading to find out their wants are, or making social media videos of the clean-up events. Mrs. Cordero said that it is unlikely we can get all 8-hours of service from just field work so it is important that we pick one of these extra assignments and work on it to finish out our hours.
We are all very excited to get started with our service so that we can make an impact on the City of Reading. We cannot wait to get hands-on experience from the clean-ups and further our environmental learning.
The Green Team
