Community Service Report

     For my  community service project, my Boy Scout toop and I volunteered to help with a program called "Scouting for Food".  This involved going door-to-door and asking people if they would be willing to donate any canned or nonperishable goods to the homeless of Windsor.  If they did, we would put the donated items in a bag, and once the day was done, and we had lots of items to be donated, we drove  to the Redwood Empire Food Bank, and deposited the items.  To collect the cans, our troop split into groups of two and would go to the streets that we were assigned to.  Then, using perfect manners and respectfulness, would ask the inhabitant of the chosen dwelling for food to feed the hungry.  If they did give us any cans, we would place the items in a bag, load the bag onto a handcart provided by the troop, and proceed to the next house.
     In all, the program worked rather well, and we did gain a very large amount of food to be donated to the hungry.  One thing I would change, however, is to perhaps change the date of the activity to sometime in the summer, next time.  My reasoning for this is, and you may have guessed, that the whole, entire time, it was raining.  And not just a drizzle; it was actually raining pretty darn hard.  Also, I noticed that several houses claimed that another troop had come by the day before, and had given the other troop their spare food.  I suppose that the immediate solution would be to go a little bit earlier in the year, which also is the solution to the problem of the weather.
     The next time our troop decides to do this program, I will wholeheartedly agree to help.  Despite all the rain and tiring walking up and down seemingly endless streets, and often disheartening answers, I felt good at the end of it, as I knew that was not only helping my troop gather food to be donated, I knew that I was helping those who are in need of food.  And that feeling is what I think motivates people to do projects to help others.  I've noticed that once a person does a project like this, they will often do another like it, and so on.  However, if a person has never before done a thing to benefit others, it is hard for them to get started.  But once you have done a single thing to benefit others, you start volunteering to help out more and more.  In this way, I will undoubtedly volunteer next year, and then again the next, and soon I may even start doing things for the community myself.  And so, this single project will certainly start a string of others like it.  And hopefully this same pattern will occur with more and more people.