Hello to all my followers, please take the time to read my reflection on community engagement. This was a university assignment and I was required to post it on a blog site.
Community service is a big need throughout the world especially for Non Profit Organisations (NPO), they are unable to pay staff to help them that’s why they need all the help possible. In short, the foundation students were asked to give back to their community by providing a service. In this essay, I will attempt to discuss my experience of my community service. In my first paragraph, I will talk about my first experience of the NPOs that I went to as well as what we were tasked to do, my second paragraph will discuss how I felt about working at the organisation. My third paragraph will speak about how networking played an important role in my community service as well as my skills I developed. Lastly my conclusion will sum up my topic as well as touch on the experience I gained and how I intend to utilize this experience further.
My community service task was completed at two venues. My first venue, where I along with my group completed eight hours of community service, was Friends Of Rescued Animals (F.O.R.A.). My Group decided to go to F.O.R.A. on the 31st August as we all had no class that specific day. We arrived not knowing what to expect but shortly, we found the lady who ran the centre and asked if she remembered us calling ahead to book our date. She was very kind and asked us to fill out indemnity forms. She told us a bit about F.O.R.A. stating that they had over 350 dogs and more than 150 cats as the moment, they are also providing a home to pigs, sheep’s and goats. Our first task was to give the puppies attention as there is an area of just puppies that were dying to have some fun! We threw that ball for them and held them it was adorable. We were there for about one hour and thirty minutes, shortly after that we were asked to walk dogs for the rest of the day, almost thirty minutes per dog! And we were specifically told that we were not allowed in the cages and we had to ask for help when we wanted a dog, we were also told that if there were three dogs in one cage all of them had to be walked otherwise some would get jealous. Overall my expectations of an animal shelter were completely wrong, I was so impressed at the condition of all the animals as well as their cages it completely blew me away. Unfortunately, on this specific day we were only able to complete six hours of our community service. I along with my group decided that it would be best to complete our next two ours independently as there was no time for us all to go back at the same time. I then decided to go on the 1st September where I completed my further two hours to accumulate eight hours of community service, all I was tasked to do was to walk dogs. My next venue, The EARTH Centre, was voluntary of me as I had already completed my eight hours but I decided to go anyway. It was there that I donated items, the items were four bags of carrots and two bags of apples for the horses. They gave me a description of what they do at this centre and that is providing horse rides for disabled children, their horses are trained specifically to be calm and not to let noise and other things frighten them in order to keep the children safe, he continued to say that it requires a lot of work as the child might not be able to keep itself upright and would require up to four people to help one child. At this specific centre I completed another three hours of community service, I was tasked with moving compost into a new are where they had decided to plant some trees, I found this quite interesting as now I know I helped build something great! I found this centre very well looked after I was very impressed.
I was not very enthusiastic at first to work at a NPO, I felt that this should not be a required task to pass university however, once I was at F.O.R.A. and playing with the puppies, all that went away. I was having such fun I completely lost track of time and ended up excited to come back to complete my further two hours the following day. I also enjoyed the environment of F.O.R.A, everyone was especially kind and I didn’t feel dirty as I already stated that everything was very well maintained. I also enjoyed the fact that I was with my friends and new friend, and was able to experience this with all of them! I also enjoyed the fact that the dogs were friendly, we were able to sit with them in a calm manor as well as run around with them, they weren’t aggressive at all and were very pleasant to be around. The EARTH Centre was both pleasant and unpleasant to work at, it was pleasant in the sense that I was with other friends of mine and that people at the organisation were very kind and told us all about their organisation. I didn’t enjoy the smell of the compost but once I was used to it, it was not so bad. Overall I was happy to be able to give back to my community, they made it very easy to make us feel at ease and not overwhelm us with work.
Along with all the hours and work we had to do, there was a lot of background planning that also had to be done. The first thing we had to do was organise ourselves into groups, it started out with two of my friends, Darian and Wesley soon after Ryan and Rebecca joined us as well. This allowed me to make new connections and allowed me an opportunity to get to know them whilst doing community service. Now that our group was sorted out we had to make a plan for an organisation to allow us to come and do our community service, we had a bit of a problem in this area as the first place took a week to respond to our email and said that we could only go two at a time and for not longer than three hours per day. This did not suit us. We then searched for another organisation and that is when we found F.O.R.A. who were more than willing to allow all of us to come at once and help them. I found it good that the university or our lecturers allowed us to make our own plans as this develops sills such as communication, planning and time management. Further we had to plan what to donate and where to donate it, in my group we decided to donate our own items therefore I chose to donate my items to The EARTH Centre along with another group where I did my extra community service hours. Overall I learnt a lot whilst completing this assignment, I learnt time management and saw how stressful things can be when left to the last minute which is how I felt about my donations. I also enjoyed this being a group activity as it taught me better communication skills as well as speaking to the organisations to arrange a date and so on.
Overall, I found this assignment to be rather enjoyable, besides learning a lot in terms of communication and networking I learnt how to lay compost in order to plant trees and how to handle dogs in all types of situations, the only thing I regret is not adopting all 350 dogs at F.O.R.A, if only I could! I did not find The EARTH Centre to be that enjoyable but I still learnt a lot and had a good time with my group members. I am thankful that we were tasked with this assignment as now my expectations of a NPO is not all bad. I now know that adopting a dog at F.O.R.A is just as good as getting a new puppy from a friend.
