Every day is a new opportunity to help others and change the world.
Whether you are donating goods, picking up litter, volunteering your time at a local humane society or shoveling the snow off your neighbor’s driveway—it’s impeccable to see what a big difference we can make when we all come together.
For this reason, Make a Difference Day was established to encourage community service and volunteerism, occurring every fourth Saturday of October. The unofficial secular holiday was founded in 1992 when USA Weekend magazine and Points of Light suggested to its readers that, since 1992 was a leap year, people should take the extra day and use it to do something good for their communities or for those in need.
Since then, USA WEEKEND and Points of Light sponsored the largest national day of community service for more than twenty years. While the organizations no longer support Make a Difference Day, the holiday still impacts communities around the country.
This year, members of the UWM community was invited to take partake in the city-wide effort on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020 by participating in neighborhood clean-ups of local older adults who need assistance.
The event was organized by the Center for Community-Based, Learning, Leadership, and Research. They gave out informational packets with the information of the houses the volunteers would be going to as well as rakes and bags to pick up leaves.
We were instructed to keep our masks on the entire time to keep everyone safe. I was in a group of two, so my team only had one house assignment.
When we got to the residency, we called the homeowner, Donna. She was incredibly kind and showed us her backyard full of leaves. We worked for hours raking leaves, pushing them onto a tarp and carrying them out to the road for the city to have them picked up. It was an incredibly rewarding experience to see Donna’s face light up when she saw her backyard. She was incredibly grateful, and we were able to have a chat with her about the state of the pandemic and how her and her husband were getting on. It was a valuable experience and one I hope to partake in for the years to come.