The Mass Academy Community Service Club (MACS) is a student-led organization that organizes volunteering events in the community. These events help the community while also providing ways for Mass Academy students to fulfill the 100-hour community service requirement for the school. 

 We started off our year of volunteering events by helping out at the Community Harvest Project in Grafton near the end of the summer. In A term, we hosted our first of many STEM Saturdays of the year at the main branch of the Worcester Public Library. B term has been our most eventful time yet, with another STEM Saturday and a food drive to benefit Abby’s House in Worcester. 

MACS has been helping out at the Community Harvest Project every summer for a while. This year, we had 13 volunteers and were able to harvest 1,800 servings of food in just two hours. This food went to help feed people with food insecurity in the community. This event is not only a way to help members of the community, but also to help build it. Before the new class of juniors starts school, some of them got the opportunity to meet each other and a few seniors as well. This was a really good opportunity to talk with each other and get to know some people before you’re suddenly working with them in your classes. 

Our first STEM Saturday was the busiest that the club has held in a while with almost 60 people coming to try the experiments and learn about STEM. The STEM activities are geared towards elementary schoolers, but we typically get a range of ages, from toddlers to middle schoolers. For our first STEM Saturday in October, we did a bird beak evolution activity, the science of slime making, and a lemon battery demonstration. At our November STEM Saturday, we helped the kids make their own lava lamps, let them make their own tinfoil boats, and did some color chromatography. These activities are always a big hit with the families that go, with some kids coming back to a station multiple times to try something again or ask a new question. It’s really heartwarming to be able to spread the passion that myself and my fellow MAMS students have for STEM with such an interested and excitable group of kids. 

 A few weeks ago, we held a pre-Thanksgiving food drive to benefit Abby’s House, which is a women and children's shelter located in Worcester. After a few hours of standing in the cold handing out flyers listing Abby's House’s preferred items, our small group of volunteers received many generous donations of both food and money. We ended the day with 33 shopping bags worth of food and cleaning supplies (which is about 5.5 shopping carts worth of food) and $56 dollars in cash. I donated this food to Abby’s house the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It’s always nice to be one of the people who help deliver the donations because you get a real view of the inner workings and impact on the organization that you’re donating to.

Over the next few weeks, we will host another STEM Saturday and a Holiday food drive to benefit the Worcester County Food Bank. To get involved in these events as a student, check out the MACS page on Canvas.