Recruiting New Volunteers

One of the main projects I started taking on at Friendship Circle is the recruitment of new volunteers.  Me along with another senior from Orange high school who is also doing their senior project at Friendship Circle have been going to various Jewish day school to give a presentation about volunteering at friendship circle.  We have already had multiple presentations and have even more planned for this week.  The target audience of these are mainly eighth and some seventh graders.

            During the presentation we do two things.  The first of which is simply describing what Friendship Circle is like and how teens are able to get involved.  The second is doing various interactive activities with the middle schoolers to show them what it is like to have a given disability.  The activities are designed to represent a certain real world setting.  For example, one of the activities involves me saying a set of directions that a normal school teacher would say, such as stating a home work assignment, and the middle schoolers have to write down what I say word for word on a note pad, but they have to do it while looking at the note pad through a mirror.  Afterwards, many of the students comment on how frustrating and difficult that was, and how annoying it would be to have to do that all day long during school.  We then explain that for some children, who have dyslexia for instance, this is the process they have to go through all day.  This helps the middle schoolers understand what exactly a child with a certain disability goes through and allows them to connect to them when they volunteer at Friendship Circle.