Steven Lamm
Dr. Patton
SLC (001)
21 November 2019
The Night Walk…or The Day Walk
ILV’s own Night Walk is the volunteer service activity that I have prepared as an opportunity for Community Outreach to consider next semester or next year. The journey has been very lengthy with this proposal and I am glad to say that I am grateful for the opportunity to complete this project. At first, I was not sure how much purpose and significance this project was going to bring to ILV or me but after completing this project, I see it through. Before I had interviewed NC State’s fire department, I was not totally sure in what ways ILV, or me personally, could help the fire department at NC State. I figured that once I interviewed the Fire Marshall, Jon Brann, I could gain a better sense of how I could help them.
After the interview, I gained lots of insight and thought of many possible options that ILV could provide for the first responders at NC State. Brann’s main need and concern was support. The term “support” is very broad but Brann gave me details for me to create possible ILV service events. His issue is that they are understaffed. They only have 5 full time staff and about 30 part time workers. Brann told me a story to show how much work they have had to do. Every month, they have to check on the 7500+ fire hydrants on NC State’s campus to make sure they are running smoothly. Recently, housing on campus has tried to help with the heavy load and taken care of 3000 of the fire hydrants, but he told me that it still takes up a lot of time. With only a small set of staff, it is hard to do the rest of what their job requires them to do. He also told me that the NCSU PD does not do enough “Night Walks” to promote safety at NC State. He told me that they only did it once a year and that is how I came up with the idea to have ILV do their own “Night Walk” every so often to help promote the safety at NC State and to help take some of the load off that our first responders have on campus.
Once I was certain and set on that idea, I began to plan how and what my video should look like to be attractive and informative for my peers in the village. I downloaded and used Adobe Premiere Pro, since I have had lots of experience with that software since high school. I also created a PowerPoint with information on how my project correlates with the Relational Leadership Model. I screen-recorded the presentation and added that to my premiere project. The time that I spent on the video turned from hours into a couple of days. I knew for the video to be good, I had to spend a lot of time on it and put a lot of heart into it. I am proud of the video that I created and I hope it attracts many ILV villagers. By the time I had finished the video and work, I became more dedicated to put this forth into action and think it is an idea that ILV could use in the future.
One of my top strengths in my StrengthFinders results was being Analytical. I used this strength to help me understand what the issues there were and what opportunities there could be. I found a way to have it work with ILV’s guidelines (timing, group sizes, transportation) and believe it has a high chance for this idea to turn into a reality. Participation is key to the success of this service. The larger the participation, the more successful this activity is. The other good news is that participation should not be an issue, since my service project can avoid non-availability with most villagers since we can control when we do this service project. As a member of community outreach with Amanda, I believe I have used what I have learned from her and the committee and used it to create a service action project that can be done in ILV. I am looking forward to the opportunity for this project to become a reality.