The service fair gave students the opportunity to explore different ways in which they could contribute to our community October 21, 2021.

Students enrolled in the Leadership Skills Honors class have worked hard all semester to create their own service projects. This class offers students at the school the opportunity to build their own service projects based upon their passions.

“I decided to join the Leadership class because I had heard so much about the service organizations that people were creating and how much they actually impacted Lourdes and our outside community,” junior Natalie Lopez said.

Department Chairperson & Summer School Director Michelle Miñoso guides her students through the extremely challenging path to create a service project. Mrs.Miñoso believes that the service fair was an excellent way for these student-made service projects to gain exposure.

“The service fair was an excellent opportunity for our students to inform the school community of the different service organizations and were able to generate interest in their organizations,” Mrs.Miñoso said. “The students were able to obtain a list of students who were interested in volunteering over the next few months.”

Each service project created is completely unique and they serve different communities in need. Due to the fact that there are so many different causes that need recognition, students claimed that picking which cause to base their service project upon was one of the greatest challenges of creating a service project.

“I think that the most difficult task of creating my service project was definitely choosing what organization to help,” junior Claudia Alessandrini said. “When researching what organizations accept clothes in Miami, I realized how many people are in need here.”

The outbreak of COVID-19 has directly affected how students are completing their service hours. Many places aren’t allowing students to volunteer due to regulations as a result of the pandemic.This is another example of how these service projects will be able to benefit students at our school. COVID-19 also created a challenge for the students creating their service projects.

“Initially connecting with non-profits has been very difficult due to the different COVID protocols which are in place,” Mrs. Miñoso said. “Some organizations are allowing volunteers to participate in person, others are limiting participation and others are still not comfortable in allowing students to attend.”

Some of these student-made service projects help our own school community. Students were inspired to create service organizations that would help our school community flourish. One service organization, called OLLA Green Team, is doing exactly that.

“Our inspiration behind creating this organization would be our want and need for caring for our environment and wanting to do the best that we could do to help it,” Lopez said. “Throughout our time at Lourdes, we noticed that as a community, we weren’t doing the most that we could to make sure that Lourdes is an environmentally-friendly school, and we wanted to change that.”

Other service organizations focus on helping people in need outside our school community. Although it is great to help our school, there are many underprivileged people in the world around us who would greatly benefit from some of these organizations.

“My service organization, Bundles of Joy, is a clothing drive that donates gently used clothing, shoes, and brand new underwear and socks to underprivileged children at the Notre Dame Child Development Center,” said Alessandrini.

There are various service projects that students have created and they all work towards helping our community in and outside of school flourish. The service fair gave students the opportunity to learn about different organizations they could volunteer for. The service fair greatly helped these student-made service projects gain recognition.

“I believe that the service fair will help our organization gain recognition and more volunteers to help us continue on with this for years to come,” Lopez said.