Volunteer Engagements

Atlanta is one of the fastest-growing cities and one of the best places to film, start a business and express talent. However, my perspective of my city is on which has a major hunger and homelessness problem. As a young girl, I always seemed to be frustrated at the lack of understanding that there was always something that I can do to make an impact. With that, I started to volunteer at the Atlanta Community Food Bank in 2018. Every weekend I packaged, sort, or helped in delivering boxes to families and seniors in need. Although I was a regular and senior volunteer, there was a plethora of diverse groups and organizations that came every weekend to show their support. As a student, sure there was some satisfaction in understanding that I made an impact to provide meals for others, but my passion is deeper than that. It's about fostering a community of engaging workers that are driven to better the community. For example, as a goal, I sought to bring at least 2 others with me every time I went to provide more support and get students like me to get engaged in community service.

Fueled by my academic struggles, Math Mentors was an after-school program founded by me to allow middle schoolers to receive math help from high school students. Every week, I took charge of leading meetings, keeping track of student relationships and performance, and maintained a positive environment. This program opened my eyes to the various opportunities that I, a ninth-grader at the time, could create for myself, as many of our mentees had started to achieve a 70% increase in their math assessments by our first year.

The biggest challenge with this program was recruiting both mentors and mentees. Oftentimes, a student may need help and is afraid to express their feelings about the subject. This caused many students to deny that they needed support from the program and caused a shortage of mentees. However, through offering incentives for the program and inquiring with teachers, mentees were soon headed our way. Shown above is one of the surveys we conducted to recruit students who were interested in getting support from the program.

As apart of being in the Urban Youth Harp Ensemble, anyone has the opportunity to learn the harp outside of class on either Monday or Tuesday every other week. These afterschool classes consisted of 5th to 12th grade students as they combined a shared knowledge into performing pieces, understanding sight-reading, and improving upon their techniques. As a way to get further involved in my community, I took advantage of the opportunity to mentor and teach the students in that class.

On class days, my teacher Ms. Hairston and I took turns leading the class and working individually with students to encourage all students to keep working hard and showcase their skills. Working in both a musical and education setting really allowed me to expand my networking and teaching skills. Every session was not perfect and I used every mistake as a learning experience to better improve my own skills. Through it all, I loved engaging with the children and watching them foster their own skills like I did years before.