Summer Learning Buddies Cohort – Fall 2020 Award Recipients
Our next Get Involved Community Engagement Award recipients are Stephanie Yang, Liliana Gomez, and Ahshima Saini, all sophomores at Gunn High School. For their project, they volunteered with Summer Learning Buddies, an organization created seven years ago to prepare learning materials for students with learning disabilities.
Get Involved Foundation first interviewed Stephanie, who mainly did the drawings for picture books for those who are visually impaired. She says that her work has impacted the community by creating engaging material for kids who usually would not be able to get learning resources, especially in an online environment.
Personally, Stephanie says that this service project has broadened her view of the community by introducing her to students with different situations. By seeing the happy faces of the students who read her books, she learned the importance of community service and the far reaching effects it can have. By taking a few days each day of her summer break to help create projects, she was able to help many children for years, which was a very gratifying experience.
Our next interview was with Liliana, who helped prepare slides for teachers who teach students from Kindergarten to 5th grade. She says that her work helped ease the workload on teachers and provided enriching material for students.
Through this service project, Liliana has learned how to be more patient, flexible, and understanding. When working with kids, she learned to be flexible since nothing ever goes as planned. She learned to be understanding when the students were moody or hesitant to participate in activities. She also learned to be patient because preparing slideshows took hours of work and there were no shortcuts. Throughout the summer she grew very much as a person and she is thankful for the opportunity to help others.
The last interview was with Ahshima, who was inspired to volunteer with Summer Learning Buddies since the program had helped her brother with ASD overcome reading and writing struggles. At SLH, she also helped make and teach slideshows through a method called Phono-Graphix.
Personally, this service project has given Ahshima communication skills and confidence. Additionally, she has realized the importance of patience and being able to be open to new ideas. By working directly with her supervisor as well as students, she has gained greater understanding of her personal values. Not only that, Ahshima is now better able to understand her brother and the difficulties he has overcome, which has given her greater pride in her brother.
All in all, Stephanie, Liliana, and Ahshima were able to learn valuable personal skills through Summer Learning Buddies. Additionally, they were able to greatly help those in the community and gain a greater overall appreciation for volunteer work. View Stephanie’s interview here. View Liliana’s interview here. View Ahshima’s interview here.