Call to Action Day

Call to action day is an event used for use students to participate in community involvement and do community service. For my event, my group and I went to the Second Harvest Food Bank and boxed sweet potatoes for hungry families. In our three hours, we managed to fill 800 boxes, which was over 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes. Our act was rather simple because all we did was put potatoes into boxes, but it still felt rewarding knowing those boxes were going to hungry families who needed them. However, I feel like we missed a sense of connection with the people we made the boxes for. If we had been able to give them the boxes after we had boxed them, like I did once at another food drive in Stockton, I feel like us students would have felt and seen how much more of an impact we had on those people. Yet, had we not been there to box the potatoes, only two men who work there would of had to box all of that themselves, so we ended up helping them out as well.
To better the whole call to action day experience, I feel like the whole event should be planned out better. For the sign ups, it should be made more aware sooner that you can sign up for your own choice of event on the website rather than relying on a teacher to sign you up. Also, I noticed from hearing from all of the different activities that took place, that no one--or at least very few people--felt like they truly had a meaningful connection to the event that they did that day. I feel as though if we had actually had a better chance to meet and hear the stories of those we were helping, we would have had a better understanding of the impact we were actually having on our community.

Orientation Engagement Experience, August 28th

Orientation engagement day was the first time we would be able to meet our freshman seminar teachers and get a chance to get an better idea of what our class was like. The meeting we had before we went with our teachers was to welcome us not only to the freshmen seminar curriculum, but also a welcome to Notre Dame de Namur University. The meeting was rather boring because us students were more interested in meeting our teachers and learning what our classes were about. Besides that, the actual experience inside the classroom was great. We got to meet the ACLU whom many of our activities in class will be in regards to, and we got to better get to know our teacher and her background.