Community Service Experience

I was not able to volunteer as much as I would have liked this semester. For community service this semester, I volunteered with the Honors Program with Cultivating Community as well as at Partners for World Health, though I was also happy to start my involvement as a leader with the Honors Program. The first community service experience I had with the Honors Program this semester was with Cultivating Community, cleaning up the community garden on Boyd Street in Portland.
While there were only a few of us there, we worked hard for four hours and were able to complete a lot of work! I loved meeting some of my fellow Honors peers and working with them to help out an organization that is able to do so much for urban, underprivileged areas. When we arrived to the garden that day I was so surprised about how much they were able to do with such a small area. I don’t know how many times I have traveled on Franklin Street being so …show more content…
This six-hour day of volunteering there was so eye opening and inspiring. I was so attracted to both the medical and fighting-poverty aspects of the organization. As I was working with Jenna and Jazmin removing packets of iodine from their packages to remove the expiration date so that it would be legal to ship, I started thinking about how wasteful the culture is in which we live. It is not that I don’t understand the purpose of placing expiration dates on products well before the expected date of product expiration within our society due to liability, it’s just that it is sad to think that so many products that are still perfectly fine are thrown away because of these inane rules. Therefore, this organization makes me so happy since there are many developing nations that don’t have the same standards as us who can use these