At Linn Benton Food Share, an agency of the Oregon Food Bank, students spent hours working to ensure that food was ready to be distributed to families who needed it. In class, they learned about how the Food Bank operates, how many people are served by the bank and partner agencies like food pantries throughout the country, and how much volunteers are needed to accomplish such large projects.
Student experiences
1-Abdulla Ali from United Arab Emirates .
PRE-SERVICE
Linn Benton Food Share:
I know a bit about the Linn Benton food share that we will work with today. I heard they help people who seek emergency food, by giving them food boxes from the Oregon food bank. We will go today as group to help and support the employees and the volunteers there. We might distribute food to the people there. We will be listening to their instructions, after that we going to do what they will give us. I am looking forward to knowing deeply about Linn Benton Food share. In addition, I want to know how they are organizing their work individually and collectively. I am quite nervous about how we will mange this work successfully, because this is the first time for me and the majority of my group. However, I expect our business will be easy because we will be working as group and that will make the work lighter and faster.
Post –service
I really feel proud to have helped and supported the employees in Linn Benton Food Share. It was my second volunteering program that I have had in the United State. I was nervous but when I went there everything went well. My role there was to take the food from the donation boxes and sort them in the right place such as dry food, vegetables, fruit ,meat, beans and soup. We learned many things today. I was struggling at the beginning about how to sort the food in the right box. However, I fixed this issue when the supervisor explained to us how to divide each piece and sort it in the right box. She gave us important instructions about our business, such as: don’t sort dented cans , sort the liquid slowly because there were glass and sort the food in the right box. When we were done with this job, we moved to break the boxes down to recycle them. Finally, we boxed the food with specific weight which was 24 Grams. After that we took a tour around the store to get knowledge about the rest of the store.
Every time is different!