Community Service Research Paper

I have been involved with Girl Scouts for 8 years and through that experience, community service and many hours spent volunteering have become very meaningful to my life as well as taught me many things that I will use throughout my life. I have volunteered countless hours, but out of all of the work I have done, my Girl Scout awareness project has had the greatest impact not only on the community, but on myself as well. For my project, I had hoped to bring reckless and drunk driving awareness to the community to help out the parents who have lost children themselves to this issue, and to show teens that getting behind the wheel intoxicated can be extremely hazardous. Being a teenager myself and witnessing fellow classmates pass away due to this issue, it breaks my heart to know that the cause of their death was a couple of alcoholic beverages. My project was to show students the risk of their decisions. At another local Girl Scout meeting around our community, myself and three others attended as guest speakers to present our project and to help spread awareness. The four of us had worked immeasurable hours on our presentation with facts, videos, pictures and props to show our community just how dangerous it truly is to drive intoxicated. After preparing our speeches and deciding how we were going to present the project, we were quick to
find a local troop to start out with. When we first started, I was very pleased to see that not only were the girls paying attention, but the parents were too. The girls and guardians recognized the commonality of drunk driving and the many terrible effects that come from it. As we listened to participants, I felt proud as I noticed they got the message. As a result, the four of us decided to take our community outreach project a step further. The four of us had done twice the research we had done before and came to the conclusion of making a live video about it. We decided to cover two separate concepts in the video – safe driving, and unsafe driving. We recorded how to park correctly, stop at stoplights and use your blinkers as well as show what could happen if you didn’t do these things correctly. With the completed video, we decided to attend another local meeting and present the video as well as the other information we had collected before to make one gigantic awareness project. Before we knew it, we had the girls laughing but also understanding the true concept of driving under the influence. After both presentations, we contacted our troop leaders and asked them if they could send out our information and videos to other local troops to help spread additional awareness.
Within a few days, we got various thank you letters and additional ideas to help further our project. We still had the troops that we presented our projects to contacting us with additional questions. The booklet we constructed to inform visitors of the many risks of drunk driving still remains with the troops. As we are all now senior Girl Scouts, we still continue to further the understanding of driving under the influence in our
community. I never expected the impact this project would have on me. The depth of caring, understanding, and gratitude I have seen only emphasize my commitment to stand up for what I believe in. I am so inspired every day because of the things I have seen and learned by making this project a reality. I put my heart and soul into this project for a reason, to fight driving under the influence and to bring awareness to the effects of it. Not only did I teach the community something, but I taught myself so much more.