Passion Impact | We engage with students to foster self-awareness, interpersonal understanding, and social justice through civic leadership!

When we thought about our community’s needs, we realized that a lot of the needs already had programs developed to address them. However, in thinking about ways we could impact the McDaniel community, we saw a need to appreciate the teachers that put in so much work for us.

Hey y’all! My name is Lane and I was an intern with Passion Impact for six weeks this summer. The experience was super transformative for me and I wanted to share a little about how it impacted me. Passion Impact is an organization that works to empower students to create change and bring awareness to important social justice issues. While this is done through a multitude of programs, we were tasked with creating a Volunteer Event Program (VEP) within our high school (McDaniel). We will help to run this program in our schools by recruiting members, planning volunteer events, and creating a culture of volunteerism!

Before we jumped into event planning, we had a lot of opportunities to learn and grow in our new role as leaders. We watched and reflected on Ted Talks about leadership, intersectionality, and finding the right career as a way to understand ourselves and who we were serving better. We also attended a wide variety of workshops to identify our skills, improve our interviewing abilities, get a grasp on intersectionality, and figure out how to pay for college. These workshops were super engaging and definitely one of my favorite parts of the internship.

Once we had developed our skillset a little more, we started brainstorming and developing our first volunteer event. When we thought about our community’s needs, we realized that a lot of the needs already had programs developed to address them. However, in thinking about ways we could impact the McDaniel community, we saw a need to appreciate the teachers that put in so much work for us. While there is a teacher appreciation week, it is sorely under-supported and participation is low. So, we decided to create an event around teacher appreciation that included local businesses and really made an effort to include as many students as possible.

Planning this event required reaching out to local businesses to solicit donations and thinking about how to get the student body involved to the greatest degree possible. We decided that offering letter writing supplies to students and doing a lot of social media campaigning would get the most students appreciating teachers. Planning this event was really fulfilling and I hope it has a significant effect on the McDaniel community.

Overall, this internship was an incredible experience and I’m so glad I was able to connect with so many smart and talented people to make an impact on our community. I’m definitely looking forward to all the events VEP will plan over the following year!

Lane

We engage students to foster self-awareness, interpersonal understanding, and social justice through civic leadership.

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