By Phillip St. Clair
Partner: Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life
Volunteers: 86
Service Partner: Lenora B. Smith Elementary School
When: January 4th – 7th, 2011
TCF: Aundrea Dean, Emily Kean, Dan Nemiroff, Phillip St. Clair; Program Manager Ken Wakwe, Project Manager Hugh Harlow, Deputy Director Wil Holbrook
After a relaxing holiday break and ever eventful New Year’s Eve activities, all the members of TCF were on a plane headed to Miami, Florida on January 2nd, 2011 to begin a new year in service. Aundrea, Emily, Dan, and myself worked with Hillel, a Jewish college campus organization to run an alternative winter break program. This trip was a different type of event where the volunteers participated in a half day of physical service and a half day of human service for a week. The 86 college age students rotated through different physical service projects at Lenora B Smith Elementary school.
Coming into this project I had no idea how a whole week of service would run. TCF is great at preparing for a week and then running a high intensity full throttle service day, but our team had not yet run a full throttle week. However, this service week proved to be a great experience and provided insight into the next Hillel project, an alternative spring break trip, that Emily Kean and I are leading in March. Thankfully we learned what worked and what needed some tweaking for the future.
With a group of 86 people working more than 860 volunteer hours that week, we were able to beautify and bring transformative change to the Lenora B. Smith Elementary School. We built, stained, and painted mural benches, cleared land for a 40’ x 60’ garden, and painted wall murals which were placed around the campus to bring life and enthusiasm to the halls. The schools’ mascot, “Edu-gators,” was painted in the halls and along the outdoor walkways along with stop signs to help teachers and students stay in lines. We also built planter benches to provide much-needed sitting areas around campus, and filled the music room with new murals to express more creativity. I was especially happy to improve the music classroom as it is such an important class for students and is being cut from so many schools.
The unique part of this trip was that after the physical service was completed in the morning, the students then visited two different after school programs in the surrounding community for the afternoon. Sixty-six of the Hillel volunteers visited Dunbar Elementary School to help students finish homework and/or play games. The other twenty Hillel volunteers visited Overtown Youth Community Center where they were able to work along with the staff of OYC to engage their students in new activities and lessons. Each volunteer was encouraged to work with the same 1-2 students each day to bond and build relationships. By the end of the week, this was by far the favorite part of many of the volunteers' service experience.
Our team was able to stay in South Beach for a couple of days towards the end of the trip. It was phenomenal to walk around the strip after a successful service week. By the way we were strutting around; you would have thought we owned South Beach. We had great suggestions for where to eat from our teammate Dan, who served with City Year Miami last year, and got a good feel for that part of Miami. We even got to see where some of the folks from the TV show, The Jersey Shore, went out for a “chill night in South Beach”. Being able to commit a week’s worth of effort, time, enthusiasm, and energy made me truly appreciate the work we do and the partners who make it possible.
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