Blog

Year 9 Community Service Expo

During the Community Service Expo, the Year Nines participated in several activities that helped them explore and understand how one can be emphatic to those in the community. The Community Service Expo was split over two days. On the first day, my group participated in CPR training, where we learned how to help someone if they are in dire need of emergency assistance. As the day proceeded, we continued on with our activities, with learning about Surf Life Saving as our next initiative. We learnt how to understand different Life Saving signals and were given tips on how to save ourselves and how to save the people around us. The day concluded with muffin making for raising funds for the St. Vinnies Food Van. We started this session off with a presentation and then went to the kitchen where we made some muffins and sold them to help raise money for those living rough on the streets.

On the second day, we started with knitting woollen squares to help an organisation known as KOGO. KOGO stands for Knit One Give One, their organisation essentially creates woollen goods for families who cannot afford them. We knitted squares to help make a bigger blanket to help a family living rough, by doing this, we enacted KOGO’s motto, which is: ‘To share the warmth’. The day continued with an interesting e-interview with people involved with the Big Idea organisation. They provide homeless people with an income via selling magazines or subscriptions. This e-interview provided much-valuable insight into how this organisation worked and what it stood for. The day concluded with a documentary explaining the plight of refuges and how an organisation, named the ‘Treehouse Project’ was helping them. The documentary was very emotional and thought provoking as it showed the hardships of children who were asylum seekers and refugees.

All in all, this expo was a very valuable day for us Year Nines to learn how some of the members of our modern society were suffering, and also how we could help them to get back onto a better road of life.

Since the expo was made up of many events, there were many sessions that people found better than others. My personal favourite part of the expo was definitely the CPR session. As this session was a hands-on experience in practicing CPR with an actual dummy, this activity was all-the-more exciting and engaging.

The main purpose of this expo was to bring together a plethora of organisations and projects that help out the community and use them to teach us, a cohort of Year Nine students, on volunteering opportunities within the community. This expo taught us that no matter how big or small, our contributions all make a difference within the community. This expo also taught us how we can help, whether by having a conversation with community members about these important issues, or by getting involved ourselves with a more hands-on approach.

Ben Abraham
Year 9 Student