Creator: Jesse Romano
For my artifact, I decided to create a PowerPoint that highlights my experience volunteering at the United South End Settlements. Within the PowerPoint, I divided my experience into three sections: Expectations, Impactful Moment, and Reflection.
The first section, “Expectations”, includes my preconceived notions of what I was going to do at the USES location. Originally, I thought it was a place that parents could drop off their children after school, and the volunteers and staff would just help them with their homework and keep them occupied until they were picked up. I went into my first day volunteering there with some ideas of activities the children can do together. However, after my first day, I realized there was a lot more to it.
The second section, “Impactful Moment”, consists of one of my service-learning blogs. This particular piece details the first time I established a connection with one of the children in the program. This account more accurately represents the rest of my service-learning experience than what I had originally expected it to be. It was very hands-on, and I was fortunate enough to establish a relationship with almost all of the kids.
The third section, “Reflection”, includes what I got out of the experience and how it differed from what I originally thought the experience was going to be. This experience was a great opportunity to interact with people of different backgrounds and perspectives. Watching them interact with each other was enough to help me learn about society as a whole, such as how the children judge each other based on their characters and not on their identities or physical characteristics, indicating that people are not born racist or sexist but that those ideologies are passed on from the environmental influences around them.
