SHARE has the same goal every year: to have as much student participation as possible. This year the program is trying to “improve the promotion of SHARE projects at the beginning of the year and increase sign-up numbers,” said SHARE Coordinator Krissie Wiggins.
According to Wiggins, the program has already made improvements from last year because every week a new organization is looking for student volunteers. The SHARE executives also want to help the students to track their service hours more closely.
In addition to those improvements, there are three new projects: Junior Board, Pack of Pals, and Special Olympics Unified Sports team.
“We wanted to start these projects to get a different variety of volunteer opportunities for all students in SHARE,” says senior SHARE chair executive Allison Sernett.
Junior Board hopes to encourage students to volunteer for nonprofit organizations through competitions, which requires them to do research and work for grant money for a specific organization. Junior Board is popular at the college level for students who want to work in the nonprofit world. East will be the first in the area to adopt Junior Board.
Another new program is Pack of Pals. The founder of the program retired last year, so seniors Tommy Sherk and Baker Stradinger pushed for SHARE to start doing it again. The program allows for students to participate in activities with special education students. These activities include bowling, trick-or-treating, or going to lunch. Wiggins feels that It helps create a real bond with the different groups of students.
The final program is a Special Olympics Unified Sports Team which will have volunteers pair up with special education students to compete against other high schools in a variety of activities like basketball, bocce ball and soccer.
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