Erica's Community Service Project

Community Project

On March 25 I volunteer for Adopt-a-park through Cougar Volunteers for my Community Project. Adopt-a-park is a program that encourages the public to commit to helping to enhance and car for their community green life. The group was lead by Alex Louis, Assistant Director of Greek Life for the Center for Leadership and Service and Kristen Failla, a Service Specialist for Center for Leadership and Service. I choose this community volunteer because I felt that this type of work is taking for granted and the more help the better.

The park the cougar volunteers went to was Warinanco Park located in Roselle. This is a fairly large park that offers trials, fishing, picnic areas, sports field and much more. The director of the site Betty Anne Kelly an environmental specialist of Union County parks met with the group to discuss what we were going to do for the park. She explained how the snow and other bad weather caused trash to pile up in the river, leaves sticking to the ground, and branches falling from trees. The trash piling in the river is harming the wild life. The trash pile comes from picnics and debris blowing into the water. The leaves are blocking the growth of newly planted plants. From the snow and rain the weight of the leaves is pressing down the plants that were recently planted from another group. The tree branches were in the way for the staff that do maintenance in the park.

Our group split up to do different jobs. One was to take plastic bags and pick the trash out of the river around the park. Another job was to rake the leaves that piled up around the river in order for the plant life underneath to grow. From the leaves collected it’ll be made into mulch. Another job was to collect larger branches around the park. That job was to make it easier for maintenance to do their job. We were to conduct these jobs within three hours.

My job was raking leaves. At first I thought it would impossible to rake the amount of leaves that piled up. Majority of us were raking leaves. We broke up into sections to make the job easier. As we were raking you were able to see the plant life underneath all around the river. Unfortunately I did some dead wild life under the leaves. This was probably due to the inability of movement underneath the leaves and the low temperatures. I didn’t realize the effect of removing leaves can have on the environment. While raking I started to think that there was too many leaves to rake to make a difference. However, I really saw a lot of fresh plant life all over in the ground. Within the three hours our group was able to rake about 23 bags of leaves that was going to be made into mulch.

It was a job well done. Our group got a lot accomplished with cleaning up the park. Sometimes we take for granted all that surrounds us. We don’t think to much about cleaning up after ourselves at a picnic or raking our leaves. This community project taught me that the simple things can make the biggest difference. Picking up after yourself and raking leaves can help our environment bloom. Now I am trying to make small but impact changes in my community and promoting others do to the same.