克城消息

華人愛心中餐日:Volunteer Experience

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to visit the Norma Herr Women’s Foundation in downtown Cleveland and help distribute food to women in need for Chinese American Food for Love Day. It was an amazing experience in which I learned a lot about the Norma Herr foundation and how they help these women. My passion for helping these women in need all started at the beginning of the semester in my theology class. We were assigned groups and topics for our major social justice project. Our topic was violence against women, and we did tons of in-depth research about the issue of violence against women and how it affects the community. At this point, I was hooked. We studied the effects globally, nationally, and locally, and we even conducted multiple interviews with people that worked in the field. We eventually ended up making a Google Site that serves as an outlet for all our findings and serves as a platform to raise awareness about violence against women. We also made an Instagram account to engage the community to learn about the problem of violence against women. However, through this whole process, I never got any physical experience, only information through online research and email exchanges. Therefore, I jumped at the chance to actually go to a shelter and get some hands-on experience, and I am so grateful that I did. During the trip, I was able to talk with many of the workers about their situations and about the nature of their work. I also got the opportunity to briefly interact with many of the women in the shelter. It truly a once in a lifetime experience that I will never forget. It showed me how far a simple act of kindness can go, and I would love to go volunteer again anytime in the future.