Our EACAP Service consisted of helping clean the streets in the city of Reading. The main goal of our service was to help the community stay clean as well as informing the younger crowd about the dangers of wastes going into our environment. We had to complete total of eight hours of community service to make this project a success and it was. As a group we all collaborated with our ideas and were able to come together and complete this project.
To start off, Gi and Jordyn attended an event with SOP, South of Penn, and they worked together along with other Penn State students. In this meeting they met Tony who was the SOP coordinator and he explained what his organization did and how it functioned. They also worked together to make flyers to post around the city about a clean-up event they were hosting in April. With this they were able to complete two hours of community service. They created an advertisement that demonstrated what SOP was doing within the community and focused on the upcoming even that SOP had been preparing for. The advertisement was to get the community involved and have the community have fun as a whole while coming together and cleaning up their environment around them, in which they live in.
Ashley and Cynthia participated in a neighborhood clean-up which took place in South Reading. This clean-up was with SOP vs. Barrios. These two organizations went face to face and made teams to see whose team picked up the most trash. Children and adults of all ages came together and as an entire group picked up over 30 bags of trash including leaves to let it turn into compost. At first, we thought it was not going to take as long as it did because we originally thought there wasn’t going to be too much trash. We were wrong, one block after another we were always spotting the smallest pieces of trash and were surprised to see how much we collected.
As a group, we also went canvasing which consisted of us knocking door to door to ask residents in the community about how they felt about their neighborhood and give us their input on how the community could be better. We also went to Reading High School and set up a table after school to give the students a little educational yet fun lecture about the importance of reusing. We had the students make piggy banks out of water bottles to show them simple ways we can make art out of trash. We had over 300 students attend this event and it was very pleasing to see how interested they were in our topic.
Our overall experience went well, we learned a lot from helping out in the community and got some personal perspectives from others. We never really knew how badly our environment was being damaged until we acted upon it and actually opened our eyes. All of us learned that if we don’t act upon this issue nothing will change. We took the things we learned into consider and made some personal changes in our lives when it came to recycling and making the earth a cleaner place.
It is nice to hear that individuals from various age groups are able to come together to clean up the community. I am glad that you guys enjoyed the project, and were able to make a positive change in your daily lifestyles.