Service Learning Blog 2

These past two weeks have been a really great change in the dynamic of the Service Learning project. Last week I spent both Tuesday and Thursday out in front of the Student Union tabling for YAYA and asking for donations. It felt very empowering to see how many people were willing to donate with what little knowledge they may have had about YAYA or our project. It is great to see that people want to help, they just need the information brought to them so they know to do so. With the work from tabling and the hard work the other class members put in, I believe we did an amazing job reaching our fundraising goal. To see how happy Abi was when she counted up the money was great, and she is just one member of YAYA. I wish that I could have been there to see the reaction from all the other members and the farm workers themselves.

Other than the money we have already raised, it is still necessary that we start raising money for the shirts that we would like to give to YAYA to distribute to the farm worker community. I think that we should continue to ask for donations outside the Union, but we also need to come up with some more creative ideas to get donations as well. I believe we all really care about doing a good job and giving what we promised to the community, and I think that is a huge motivator.

One concern that I do have, however, is the time constraints we are under. We have just been assigned a new project on Human Trafficking and this is a subject I know we are all extremely passionate about. I don't want our service learning project to have to take a back burner because of the new project. They are both equally good projects, and I want to make sure we spend equal amounts of time working on both. With that being said, meeting times will still continue to be a struggle with finals week looming upon us, but we are a great class and I believe we can pull through.

I believe that through this project I am learning a lot about working as a team. I think we often criticize NGO's thinking that things could be done better. I think this gives us all a good idea of the types of struggles certain organizations face when trying to do their own service projects.

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