Free Essays - The Joys of Volunteering :: Contribution to My Community Service

The first agency I volunteered to work for is a program called Summer Quest. Summer Quest is designed to help students that are in the sixth through twelfth grade experience a "positive summer experience." What this actually means is that it provides students an opportunity to do fun and exciting things, in a positive atmosphere. Instead of the students sitting at home alone the entire summer, they have a place where they can hang out and enjoy themselves. This is a great program that offers students an alternative to getting into trouble and being alone during the Summer. Summer Quest is also setup in a way that all the activities are relatively inexpensive. This is where I come in. I was in charge of putting together a schedule of activities for each week. The schedule included an activity for Monday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Thursday from 4:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., and Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. This was a very difficult assignment. I had to plan fun events, but also make them very inexpensive. This was an interesting task that allowed me for the first time to use many of the skills I had learned in my Organizational Communication classes. I had to negotiate prices for admission, and figure out transportation and food cost. It also taught me a lot about planning and time organization. I had to plan months in advance, and fill in every second of the day with activities to keep the students busy. Now I know that in the future when I am in the real world, I can plan big events and pull them off successfully because of this experience. The second agency that I worked for was Parkway Preschool. This agency has two types of programs. They call the first program "Moms Day Out." This program allows parents who cannot afford, or do not have the resources of proper child care, a chance to drop their kids off three times a week from 8:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The second program is a regular preschool program running from Monday to Friday. I had the opportunity to work with both programs during my volunteer work. During my day at the program I would sit in with different classes