For this service event, the Lions Club and I volunteered at the Zilker Botanical Garden by cleaning up the garden as needed. The area we worked on was affected by heavy rainfall so we had to rake the leaves that felt from the trees and spread mulch. Overall, it was a very great event to help out at the Zilker Botanical Garden and spend time with Lions Club members.
I volunteered with the Lions Club at the University of Texas at Austin to plant trees in Bastrop, Texas a few months after the unfortunate wildfire that took place in Bastrop, Texas. The service event was an excellent opportunity to engage in something beneficial for the environment, all the while hanging out with Lions Club members as well as students from other universities.
TreeFolks is a non-profit organization that aims to improve the atmospheric conditions of cities by planting trees. For this service event, we separated ourselves into groups and then planted trees in a local Austin area. It felt nice to learn how to plant trees, speak with TreeFolk members, watch the graduation ceremony, and hang out with Lions Club members.
This service event was designated for nursing some of the Austin’s community gardens back to health in order to provide warm meals for the needy. Upon entering the main garden, we separated ourselves into groups (there was other organizations other than lions club) and then headed to our sub-gardens. When we arrived to our garden, we took out the weeds, refined the platforms, added new soil, added seeds according to a gardening guide, and then watered the new plants. Afterwards, we shared some nice tea with the house owner. Overall, it was a great event to have fun while giving back to the community.
The Bartholomew Creek cleanup and trash games event was a great opportunity to clean the city of Austin while having some fun with Lions Club members. When we arrived at the Creek, we split up into different teams and participated in a series of competitive tasks. After the competitive tasks, we went on a scavenger-hunt like journey to capture as many items of trash that were worth a designated amount of points. The goal was to rack up as many points in order to be first, second, or third place. Overall, the experience was great.
The longstanding UT Lions tradition, the graffiti cleanup, was a memorable experience as my first time giving back to the Austin community. We covered a neighborhood alley's graffiti with paint using tools that were provided to us by the city of Austin for about three hours. I thought that covering the graffiti walls would take very long since the graffiti covered the entire alley, but to my surprise we covered the walls with paint quickly as a large group.