Past Service Work and Learning Plan

I have not done a great amount of service work in the past, though I do have some experience. I have served at two food shelves in high school, the ICA (Intercongregation Communities Association) food shelf in Excelsior, MN, and the PROP (People Reaching out to Other People) food shelf in Eden Prairie, MN. At the ICA food shelf, most of my tasks dealt with unloading, sorting, and moving food that was donated. It was a kind of warehouse setting run by volunteers, mostly older volunteers, so I usually did some of the heavier lifting and tasks that required more mobility (like climbing into large boxes to retrieve bags of food that were otherwise unreachable). While working at the PROP food shelf, I had the opportunity to interact with the community members who used the food shelf. There my tasks usually consisted of either sorting food donations or making carts of food for families that came in according to their needs. My work at prop had a much greater impact on my perception of things, in that I was able to meet the people who used the food shelf in person, most were very kind and interesting people, while some kept more to themselves. There were occasionally some quite demanding people that made working a little more stressful, but overall it was a very good experience.
In addition to working at couple of food shelves, I also had the opportunity to work at Feed My Starving Children in Eagan, MN. Feed My Starving Children is a nonprofit Christian organization that makes food mixtures to feed starving children throughout Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia. The food they make is designed to be easily shipped around the world, and culturally acceptable to people of the many different countries they serve. It consists of rice, soy nuggets, dehydrated vegetables, and vitamins and minerals, to provide good nutrition at a low cost, with simple preparation (just adding water). Working there I was able to taste the food, and I can say that it is much better than some of the meals I’ve made in college. The cost per meal to make the food is about 17 cents, and the work involved in making it involves mixing together the separate ingredients in the right quantities into a bag, which is then sealed and ready for shipping. In working at Feed My Starving Children I gained a more global perspective on the idea of service, and was able to see the vast difference between the way that Americans (even the more impoverished Americans) live and how the majority of people across the world live in the less developed countries.
There are a few things that I would like to learn and do over the course of my service experience this year. The first would be to make a positive change in the community I’m working in, mostly, being able to see the difference between the beginning and end of the project. I secondly like to learn about the history of the both the church and the community that I am serving in. Though I am not myself from Dubuque, my Grandparents grew up in Dubuque, and I would like to learn a bit about the history of at least part of Dubuque, in order to get a feel for what it was like for them growing up and living in Dubuque. I would also like to get the opportunity to interact with some of the families in the Washington neighborhood and learn about their lives and what their history in Dubuque might be or else their reason for coming to Dubuque. Lastly, I would also like to learn a bit about the Presbyterian faith, since I will be working with the First Presbyterian Church downtown. I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic schooling my entire life. However, I feel that one of the things that helped me to look more deeply into matters of faith was what I learned about the Lutheran faith, going to a daycare run by the wife of a Lutheran Pastor. I hope to have a similar widening of perspective by learning about the Presbyterian faith.