Personal Experience: The Benefits of Service Learning at Ccpc

For my Service-Learning Field Experience, I choose the opportunity to volunteer with Christian Center of Park City (CCPC), which is a local nonprofit organization that helps low income families and children in need in the Summit and Wasatch Counties. Here I will analyse some benefits of service learning, in this essay I will also share my experience of volunteering in CCPC and what this opportunity gave me. 

CCPC is a Christian, humanitarian community resource center that organizes housing assistance for low income families, and help improve the lives of people and communities through meeting immediate and basic needs. I was glad to have this great opportunity to get involved with an institution that functions to serve and support our local community.

After getting in touch with the volunteer coordinator, Jessica Jarvis, I was scheduled to work in the food pantry every Tuesday. I was assisting sorting food items, checking for expiration dates, and maintaining the pantry area clean and organized. The tasks that were given to me were straightforward and fun. I was also be engaging with those who were shopping at the food bank, helping them to fill up grocery carts that were not only nutritionally balanced, but also fit the needs of their family. From this experience I learned how to work as a team member and communicate with others whom I wasn’t familiar with. To my surprise after the second time of volunteering, the manager offered me a supervisor opportunity, working two days a week. This brought me back to the time when I moved to America 15 years ago and my only chance to get my foot in the door at the local library I wanted to work was volunteering. Volunteering made me a stronger job candidate and I was hired after 3 months working as a Shelving Assistant. Soon I was promoted as a Senior Library Assistant and stayed with the company for 5 more years.

Most of the time the terminologies; volunteering, community service and service learning get interlinked and becomes confusing for people. Unquestionably, they have overlapping features for which it may often seem to be similar.

Volunteering is the contribution of time, effort and talent to a cause, or mission without financial gain, while people doing community service are usually assigned by schools or courts doing service to assure that they fulfill the requirements of their assignment. Volunteering and community service can give you the opportunity to try something new, gain experience, develop skills, improve your career prospects, build confidence and meet new people. It also helps develop civic and social responsibility skills, and helps to become more aware of what the needs of the community.

Service-learning is a combination of studying and volunteering at the same time. It also combines community service with in-school curriculum, to the benefit of both the community and the classroom. By pairing community involvement with classroom learning, service-learning also increases the likelihood that students will gain better understanding of social issues, and that they will learn to empower disadvantaged communities.

Overall, meeting the children and families who receive food through the CCPC Food Pantry reminded me why everyone here works so hard. I also learned that a person’s financial state can change in the blink of an eye, and the appearance, demeanor, and education level of an individual needing assistance from a food pantry can vary remarkable. This place helps people in ways that I never even knew about, and I’ve realized why it’s crucial to have organizations like this. Food banks serve an incredibly important role in both eliminating waste and in feeding the hungry. But they can’t succeed at either without volunteers.