Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Petersburgs population is African American, and more than 53% of the population is
made up of females and the C.A.R.E.S. shelter only serves females and children with
their member population being predominantly African American.
This community has strengths in that it has organizations such as C.A.R.E.S.
who want to help build the community to have healthy, self-reliant women;
however, they cannot do all of the work on their own. The city of Petersburg has
recently been in the news for missing funds and corruption within their government
officials. The government and its officials must step up and be strong in moral in
values to do what is best for the community. Petersburg, VA is full of rich history,
starting to boom with small business, and can be full of great opportunities if the
government can work in favor of the community and promote health and
independence and extend resources to its citizens.
Reflecting on Service Learning
This experience has taught me that I am more of a leader than I thought I
was. Because I stepped up to lead the group in our community service activity with
researching, reaching out to the shelter, delegating tasks, and creating the
presentation I feel much more confident to take on a leadership role in the future. I
also felt that the entire community service was a humbling experience by helping to
provide these women and children with just the most basic things in life such as
food and basic hygiene items.
Completing the project really took all 5 of the practices of exemplary
leadership from modeling the way by showing my commitment to the group, to
inspiring a shared vision by listening to what my group members wanted to get out
of this experience and offering up my ideas. I even challenged the process by doing
something different from the service learning opportunities we have done in the
past and by leaving the Richmond/Henrico area that we typically stay in. I also feel
that I enabled my group members to act by stating what all needed to be done and
letting members divide the work up however best suited them. I believe that the
experience from our activity gave us all a little more humility and we all felt
rewarded after talking with the ladies from the shelter.
We all applied the principles from Leading Like Jesus within our project by
using the our head- knowing our own belief system and using that to decide an area
in the community we wanted to help and how we could help them. We used our
heart- by practicing generosity in each of us using our own finances to supply the
shelter with additional items we knew that needed. We all utilized our hand in
planning and setting goals for our service learning project, and practice habit
through our reflection after preparing and serving the meal at the shelter and
talking with the women.
Reflection on Action
What surprised me the most about the service-learning experience was the
positive attitudes of the women we were serving. They were all so thankful,
cheerful, and appeared to have a positive outlook and aspirations ahead of them,
despite whatever set back they had experienced. I will continue to utilize these
skills by remember the positive attitudes of those who had less than me and
remaining humble and understanding of my patients situations to never judge. I
feel that we were able to have small positive impact of the community by
completing this project, for a night the women and the shelter did not have to
wonder where their next meal was coming from and the women were able to chat
and share with us during our visit.