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Summer-Feeding Program Reflection

Decent Essays
I am at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. I am doing a master’s in public health right now. I study epidemiology and right now I’m trying to get into the epidemiology of stress and how social economic differences can contribute to chronic stress and how that contributes to our health. Long term I have been trying to get back into Coffee. I have worked in coffee for a long time and I would love to work at a farm level with public health in some way so that is the long term goal. I was a Vista last summer for the Summer Feeding Program. It was a blast. I got to work with a bunch of other Vistas, a few of them are still there. They stayed on for the year term. We would monitor a lot of summer feeding sites where they were feeding…show more content…
It was a ton of fun. A lot of them were more like summer camps so a lot of the times the kids were playing. I am not a very intimidating person so kids have a way of intimidating me and they can tell that I am not a boss type figure so I think I was better utilized later on at the Food Bank doing paper work and organization. It’s a crazy program. The summer feeding program is a monster of a program because they do a lot. They take on a lot for one whole summer but it is still so much fun. My vista term was just a three month term for that specific program. I volunteered for the food bank a few times here at the FRC and ever since then I just wanted to work for the Food Bank in some way. I thought that it was just so much fun. Everybody that works here seems like they have a really good time and its good work. It is really honorable work. I would check the website religiously for job openings and then they finally posted the AmeriCorps Vista program and then I got an email about it because I was still on the volunteer…show more content…
So in terms of working here, I had an idea, I mean the food resource center still does so much more than I know but I already had an idea coming in of what the purpose of this place was versus what the purpose of the Regional Food Bank is and how they are connected and the different areas they want to serve and the different purpose behind each outreach mission. They have summer programs and then they have programs like this and then they have backpack programs for kids during the school year. Learning how all of those different programs are inner connected it helps you visualize the organization as a whole. In terms of school it has been amazing because I studied public health I went into my first semester in a Master’s program already knowing a lot about the function of non-profits and already knowing a lot about things that I didn’t really expect to know about like the USDA standards for school lunches. I didn’t expect to absorb that information but I did and all of that stuff starts to come up in school when you are studying
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