As of today, our group has completed several things concerning our Service-Learning Project. First of all we have all attended the orientation with the Project Coordinator last Sunday which taught us the basics about what Project Open Hand is and their mission. We have also all met together as a group and held a teleconference with our Project Coordinator in order to clarify details as to a tentative schedule of our volunteering hours (availability, travel concerns,…). Since we do not have access to a car which would enable us to participate in Open Hand’s meal delivery drives, all of us except for me have signed up to volunteer with Team Buzz, a Georgia Tech club which participates in a lot of different community service projects throughout the year. The only problem is that since there were only four available spots on the site, I was not able to sign up on the website. Today or tomorrow I am going to call up Team Buzz and see if there is any way they can add me to their roster of people who are coming so that I can get my hours at the same time as the rest of the group as well as well as get some experience in the meal delivery runs that Open Hand performs. The only other problem is that there is only one bus that goes to Open Hand really early in the morning and one that comes back to Georgia Tech in the afternoon so if the only way we can go to Open Hand is by the bus, then we have to stay there the entire day.
Since I was wrote my priority list on the different project proposals and was assigned Project Open Hand, I have learned a lot about the organization I will be working with over the rest of the semester. Project Open Hand began twenty years ago and has grown from being a simple church kitchen to being one of the biggest providers of home-delivered meals in the entire United States. Project Open Hand performs many different projects which come together to form what they call their “Comprehensive Nutrition Care”. In fact we are only going to participate in one of Open Hand’s six projects (The Prepared Meals Program).
The purpose of our project with Open Hand is to create a brochure discussing food safety for all those who will be volunteering in Open Hand’s kitchens in the future. This will keep the moderator present at Open Hand from being forced to constantly repeat the same directions several times a day throughout the entire week. This brochure will be accompanied by a video covering the same material but most probably in more detail. I will contribute to this project by helping my group format all the different rules on the brochure in an easily readable way that is also fun and appealing to the eye. I have also had experience with making brochures and posters for different classes in the past which will make the editing much easier. However, before even beginning the brochure, I will be volunteering in Open Hand’s kitchen and most likely their meal-delivery run. This will allow me and my fellow group members to experience these safety issues first hand, which will give us a greater understanding of why these rules are necessary.
I think that this project will be meaningful to me because even though I have experienced a lot of poverty over the course of my life having spent a lot of time in India, it can never hurt to see those are much less fortunate than themselves in order to realize and be more thankful for all the things that you have. I look forward to helping all these people by packaging all these meals for the poor and I hope to be able to do the meal-delivery run because I have never experienced that before.
This project intersects the aims and objectives of our course because one of the main goals of this project is to create a brochure that will explain health safety rules for future volunteers. The goal of this brochure is not for people to simply put it aside, but to actually pay attention to what is written down and then actually follow it. In order to do this we will have to use ethos, pathos, and logos, which are 3 essential parts creating an argument. The argument we are presenting is that people should follow all the safety rules for their and the people who are receiving the food’s benefit. By integrating these three concepts into our brochure, we will make the points we will back up the argument we are making in the brochure.
