From the ages of 5-18, I attended and was raised in Catholic education. I grew up just a couple of roads away from my local Catholic Church, St. Eleanor’s Parish, and its adjacent grade school. It was a small school, roughly 60 kids per grade, and allowed for everyone in your class to become close. The school truly was a community, with many families intermingling from sending multiple children there and everyone genuinely knew everyone. This small school size fostered many close bonds and created a caring and safe environment that I truly enjoyed attending, it gave me some of my oldest and closest friendships.

When I entered the local Catholic High School, I had a similar experience but appreciated the new variety of people I got to meet. I also enjoyed the increased emphasis on developing as a mature individual that high school Catholic education employed. Ever since I can remember, I have participated in and attended service projects through my school and church. This continued to grow and grow when I entered high school, where we had mandated minimum service hour requirements to proceed to the next grade. This process was intended to encourage community service, especially in young individuals to instill the desire and effort to give back to your community.

These service projects have ranged from blood drives to creating care packages for an old folk’s home, to helping move supplies at a local animal shelter. However, the most impactful experience came during my time volunteering at my local food pantry partnered with my church.

I was raised in Collegeville, PA, a wealthy middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. This area was very well developed and is the home to Ursinus College, a small liberal arts college with a beautiful campus. I grew up feeling safe and secure in my living conditions, and never worried about where my next meal would come from.  While I loved my small education that fostered a close community, I believe it may have sheltered me from exposure to lives that didn’t look exactly like mine.

At the Daily Bread Food Pantry, I helped package pre arranged orders of food items, as well as personal care items including femine hyigene products, paper plates and utensils, shampoo, and household clearners. These products were necessities to any family and were being provided at no cost to those that needed it. The organizers at the pantry made sure to convey that these local people were coming because they truly need it, and if you were to see someone you knew, you were to politely give them privacy. While I now see how naiive and shelterd I was as a child, I realized in that moment that there were people in my community that did not know how they would put food on the table. It was jarring to realize that my and those around me’s privileges and conditions did not factually represent my entire area.

This experience served as a wake up call to zoom out of my own life and see that there are those in my community who may have struggles they do not show. This realization was a spark in the beginning of my mature development, and serves as a memorable reason I believe volunteer work to be so crucial to forming a socially aware individual and give back to our communities.