Service Learning Class Final Reflection

This concludes my Service Learning Class Race, Gender & Class in the Digital World.

I have been involved in community service since High School for the last 25 years or so, helping with service groups such as Leos and Green Machine, as well as helping coach many youth sports teams and helping run those same programs to stay viable. In this class, I helped a Non-Profit: The Life of Kai, which helps dogs find their forever homes. I loved helping Julie and her non-profit continue to make good on their mission.

My job was to help add functionality and clean things up as Julie told me what things she wanted to see improved.  I used Jira to track every request and to keep details in one place.  This helped me to stay on target and complete tasks on priority.  I also would make recommendations as to how I could make things better and I was able to help with multiple things.  A few things I accomplished was creating a bootstrap Carousel to make a slideshow work on the website.  This did achieve what she was looking for but she then requested a pause/play button which Bootstrap does not have available.  So I wrote some custom Javascript code to add that feature and it works well. I also adjusted many web pages on her Squarespace Site and helped download her Canva Images at a high quality to work well on her site. Julie had a Newsletter section but was having trouble figuring out how she should make them accessible online.  I created a custom page to display the PDF Newsletters in an applet and had a drop-down menu to be able to change which newsletter was being shown dynamically without reloading the page.  Many of these projects were challenging but also fun to work through and figure out.

It's definitely hard to say what I would improve, maybe some better planning with setting deadlines as it wasn't super clear but I tried to accomplish one of the goals each week to keep up what I felt was my end of the bargain.

My advice would be to embrace the unknown and have faith that you will figure it out. Don't be afraid to ask for help if needed. Communication is key with your community partners. Try to stay organized, using Jira which is free for up to 10 users really helped me. Also, be proactive, don't wait for your site rep to contact you, reach out and ask what you can do to help.

I enjoyed my experience helping The Life of Kai and told Julie I would continue to help if she needs so moving forward.

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