Community Service

Dominic Conti

Professor Rogers

Intro. Sociology

3/11/2018

Community Service

For our community service paper, I decided to go to Beach Church. The Beach Church was hosting an event that they called “Joy Prom”. This prom was designed to give the underprivileged and special needs students a chance to go to a prom and feel like a king or queen for one night. Although this event was intended for the special needs and underprivileged it was open to anyone in the community. They had a theme that was based on traveling the world. Some of the helpful things they did for the kids that attended was that they had a hair and make up station for those that could not afford to do it themselves or if they didn’t have the time or materials needed.

I choose this organization because I not only attend Beach Church, but I thought it would be a great activity to be a part of to make these kids have the most fun they have ever had as well as to make their dreams come true by helping them feel like they are perfect the way they are while trying to make the perfect environment for them. I also chose this activity because I thought it would be a great experience to help make a bunch of the decorations and come up with a bunch of ideas to make a wonderful night for all the people that wanted to attend.

Some of the things that I did while volunteering for the Joy Prom was help build models that resembled famous locations around the world, like the Sydney Opera House, and the leaning tower of Pisa from Italy, or the fabulous Empire State building. Some of  the more fun wonders of the world that we made was the pyramids from Egypt as well as the Eiffel tower from the beautiful city of Paris. Once we built all these well-known locations we had to bring them to life by giving it some color, after that we had set up the lights, the streamers, and many other party decorations. Once all the decorations were built and put into place we had put up the tents and set up the stands for makeup and hair. After the stands were built we had to put up the tables for the food and drinks. So that was just a piece of the effort we had to put in for this prom to be the best it could be.

Something that I had learned from participating in this project was that a lot of the special needs and less fortunate don’t have the ability to participate in as many fun activities as wealthier and not sick people. As I was there it made me realize that we shouldn’t have to throw these great kids their own prom just, so they can be happy, but to make it where that everyone can participate if they wanted to. That is the problem with society sadly is that we separate ourselves from the earliest stages of life to exclude people based on their financial status as well as their health.

During this experience I really felt that why do we as a society try for one night to make these kids and other students feel like their status or how they look doesn’t matter where as we could be doing this every day, instead of treating like they have no reason to be apart of our life. That’s why when I participated in this event I wanted to give it my all to make it the best experience they could have but also taught myself what I’m trying to argue, I learned that why am I putting so much effort in for one night instead of being this caring and considerate all the time so people that don’t have as easy as me don’t feel worthless but feel empowered because they aren’t seen as nothing. Once the prom ended I truly felt like we did something great for all the people that had attended. To go one step further we even helped the parents of these kids by providing a little extra to the prom with things that they may not have the money to spend on for their kids.