Friday, September 30, 2011

First Post!

Ravenwood Assisted Living is off to a great start! We just completed our first event earlier this week, and it was a great success! My group has decided to partner with Ravenwood to help liven up the weekends and increase the social activities that occur at the Ravenwood facility. Our goal was also to get more Drury students to come volunteer at Ravenwood and assist us with the amazing projects that we have planned for this upcoming year! So, we decided that our first event should revolve around recruiting some new volunteers for our project. We planned a movie night event in Lay where we watched a documentary titled Andrew Jenks, Room 335. For those who haven't seen this documentary, it is about a college aged boy who decided to live in an old folks home for three months. He and his two friends film all the craziness, sadness and happiness that goes on while living in the old folks home. My group and I were very pleased with the amount of people who joined us in watching this film and who signed up to help volunteer with us for this semester. We took down every volunteers' email address and are planning to send them emails before we go to a planned event and see if they would like to join us. Now, we are working on making an event to paint birdhouses with the residents one weekend in October.

I love working with the community and volunteering, which is one of the reasons I chose to live in Summit. I liked the idea that you would work with one organization or group all year, so that you could spend multiple hours with a person and really make a difference in someone's life. I am glad that my group and I decided to apply for Summit and honored that we made it. I am very passionate about our project and watching Andrew Jenks helped reawaken this enthusiasm to work with the residents of Ravenwood. In the film there is one resident who isn't happy about living in a home, her family doesn't visit her, she has nothing to do, no one to talk to and she feels like she was given up when she was placed in the home. She is basically waiting to die. When Andrew came to the home she was able to talk to him and he would listen. He was not only able to develop a relationship with her but many other bored residents. That is exactly what my group hopes to do. Get the residents out of their rooms and develop relationships with them, hopefully getting the privilege to learn about their amazing and interesting lives. I hope that I am able to make as much as an impact on their lives as they make on mine.

So far I have loved living in Summit. The apartment is great, the people are great, and we are working on a project that benefits the community. The only frustration I have had this far is about the time commitment. I am pretty involved on campus and am taking a few hard courses this semester so it is hard to find a time to go and volunteer. This is the same for my roommates who are also busy. To overcome this obstacle, we have decided to alter our calendar a little bit and volunteer on Sundays, when we have the most time free time.