Southern CA Youth Consortium
When someone says “mission related projects” to you, what does it mean? To the Southern California Youth Consortium (SCYC) it means running a project in all 5 lines of service in one day! (Disaster, Health and Safety, Service to Armed Forces, Biomedical and International Services)
Yesterday I had to opportunity to head out to Santa Monica, CA to participate in the SCYC’s Global Youth Service Day project. We arrived at 9:00am at the chapter, most of us still half asleep. In true Red Cross fashion the first thing we did was play an icebreaker. Soon out eyes were open and our stomachs hurting from laughing too much. We had a number of great speakers talking about their experiences as a youth volunteers, about International Services, and a very energetic goal setting session.
We then moved into the service portion of the day. As I alluded to above, this wasn’t your ordinary service project. Instead our group of 86 volunteers split up into much smaller groups and spread out around our community. Here is a summary of each project:
Disaster Services: Groups of youth with an older young adult hit the streets to talk to neighbors about fire safety. We handed out door hangers with fire safety. Another group performed a puppet show to educate children about what to do during an emergency
International Services: Presented information about the measles initiative at a local community college by handing out fliers and talking with passersby.
Health and Safety – Youth taught basic safety skills like first aid, rescue breathing, water safety, and bike safety to youth.
Blood Service – Canvassed a local community college in the blood drop outfit encouraging members of the community to donate blood. They actively took signups for upcoming drives and worked to dispel myths about donating.
Service to Armed Forces – Organized and handed out items to family members of veterans and wounded soldiers. In addition they handed out cards and helped the families to clean up their garden.
All in all, the day was awesome and I got to meet and work with some incredible youth. I challenge other youth around the country to copy this awesome blueprint and send us your thoughts! Shout out to my group who walked around 31st to 33rd street, we rocked it!
Pat West, California
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Blood, Consortium, Disaster, Global Youth Service Day, Health and Safety, International, Measles, Red Cross, volunteerism
whooo! this was such a great experience and I hope that there will be more events just like this one to get us, youth, out there doing service the red cross way! i think this was such a successful day and if there would be another youth service day, the number of youth would be way higher! Thank you and good job for hosting such a great event
I think this is actually a great way to serve several groups at once – it brings youth together with a unifying purpose, but also gets a lot of work done. Yes, the logistics of even sending 86 youth to separate sites seems complicated (let alone service projects I’ve done with 400 youth at the same time outside of the Red Cross) but I think this is a great way to get sheer numbers into an event.
I definitely think more areas, whether as urban as Southern California or more suburban / rural, should definitely give this sort of approach a go.
whooo! this was such a great experience and I hope that there will be more events just like this one to get us, youth, out there doing service the red cross way! i think this was such a successful day and if there would be another youth service day, the number of youth would be way higher! Thank you and good job for hosting such a great event![: