Hunger & Homelessness Awareness Week

Happy December, fellow Terps/everyone else who enjoys reading super cool blogs about service! As you all may or may not know (but really, you should know), the University of Maryland, College Park recently wrapped up Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week with a service day, sending out over 100 volunteers throughout P.G. County to do service. H&H Week is something that as a TerpCorps Coordinator, you tend to have lots of lovely panicked feelings about from about October all the way on until November 20^th, but it’s great, because we have another reason to hear from some of the most systematically ignored people in our country—the homeless. Now that it’s been over for a while, we thought we’d give you all a little recap! Get yourselves ready.

So TerpCorps is officially in its second year, and with that, there are tons of struggles that new groups always have planning big service days, like:

1. What’s the perfect Twitter hashtag for our day of service? (Congrats to some of @TerpCorps best followers who came up with #FTH, For the Homeless! Even though, if you love service-learning, you’d also love #WTH, With the Homeless)

2. What’s the PERFECT song for a community service playlist? (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is “Stuck in the Middle With You” or anything else from the groovy 70’s)

3. What are the best local organizations to send our HUGE amount of students to? Do they want students doing service with them on a weekend?

4. HOW MUCH PIZZA DO WE NEED?!?!??!?

Luckily, I, along with the other stellar people involved with TerpCorps got the opportunity to try and solve all of those problems. We even handed out the perfect amount of pizza #what?!

UMD’s Terp Service Day began with a guest speaker from the National Coalition For the Homeless, David Pirtle. He was such a rock star, I was blown away with how cool of a speaker he was and his story was really engaging, especially about how he stressed that his situation could happen to anyone, for a number of reasons. After that, the 100 or so of us got to keep David’s story in mind as we went forward in our service. We didn’t all get to work directly with those in need, but that just meant that during our SUPERFUN reflection, we got to talk about Thick v. Thin service: (visit http://umdcsl.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/thin121.jpg for a larger image)

I don’t know about all of you, but the entirety of H&H Awareness Week was a total blast, and my sincere and deepest wish is that we got a few (and by “few” I mean everyone. All people!) people excited about doing service in the P.G. area. If you attended and want to know about other ways to get involved, come out to our next service day (woooo! February!!), come out to the LCSL Office (wooooo! Stamp 0110!), or hit up the comments section, which we will monitor like crazy, just waiting for someone to post! All day! That’s right!

Thanks to everyone who came out, and a HUGE shout out to our community partners for hosting and educating us. We grow so much from your guidance, and we hope your wonderful organizations enjoyed sharing your time with us!

Vanessa “Blog So Hard” Pacheco,

TerpCorps Coordinator

Campus Swagger Coordinator, College Park Chapter

vpacheco@terpmail.umd.edu