Service Leader Retreat

Before I go in depth about my service projects, I am going to get in depth about the service retreats. Each year, around July there is service retreats for the incoming freshmen. Incoming freshmen come to campus for about three days and get to know the campus and become familiar with what the retreat is and what the Service Leaders on campus actually do.

Before I came to college, I attended my Service Leader Retreat. It was nice to know some familiar faces when I moved on campus and I had a good look into what the next four years of college had in store for me. This summer I got to provide the same insight to freshmen as I had received. We had two different groups of freshmen come in this summer for two different retreats.

I took time off work to be here for the first group of freshmen. When the freshmen got here, we helped them settle in and introduce ourselves. From then we had them participate in team bonding games and leadership building games. One of the activities we did was the human knot. As an older Service Leader Member, we agreed that only the incoming freshmen could talk and we had to keep quiet. My group took about an hour to do the human knot. It took awhile, but it was the very first step for the incoming freshmen to become leaders and try something on their own with new peers.

Throughout the retreat, we did a leadership scavenger hunt and we also did service activities. One of the service projects that we had done was repaint a building and clean up a building called Compass. I will discuss what Compass exactly is in a later blog. Aside from the not so fun service project, me and a few other service leadership went to a local library and played water games with children. This was one of the fun service projects we introduced to the incoming freshmen.

One of the games we played was similar to hot potato. All of the service leaders and children sat in a circle and when the music stopped, whoever had the cup of water got to determine who the water got dumped on.

Here is an image of me dumping water on one of the incoming freshmen. 

Playing and interacting with children is always a fun service project. As Service Leaders we get to become involved within the community, being positive role models and having fun doing so. On my next blog I am going to talk about the first service project I had gotten involved with.