Hello and welcome to my final blog post of this year! Unfortunately, this project is coming to a close very quickly, but I look forward to coming back to Butterfly Effect in later years to continue doing research and starting new projects!
As I reflect on my final project, I realize that there are many things to look at and consider, like some struggles I had experienced. While I would have obviously liked my project to always go as planned, and for it to have come easily, it had not always been this way. But, I think that even when some projects are a little messy or difficult, you learn just as much as you would have from an amazing project. And during my time with The Madison, I definitely learned many things from my struggles and challenges. Oftentimes, I had been challenged merely by time itself. Life can get incredibly busy, and because of that, I had to adapt and figure out how to properly plan my time without burning out completely. Moreover, this had been a new experience for me. All the volunteering I had done throughout my life had mostly consisted of teaching kids, or helping with activities. So, a volunteer role like the one I took on had intimidated me at first, and as I visited the center, I found that it had been difficult to find confidence or courage in myself to try something new. Now, as I look back, I realize that what I had done had been worth any fear I had as it allowed me to experience something new and meet different people.
Furthermore, this experience had changed the way I think in many ways. Even if I had spent only a few weeks with The Madison, I had learnt so many different lessons. On one hand, I had been able to change the way I think and interact with different people of various needs. My volunteer role had showed me how to deal with patience, empathy, and leadership in situations that were very different from my last project. Throughout this project, I gained a much more profound understanding of people. I’ve come to realize how important it is to surround yourself with as many different people as possible. My very first project with the Butterfly Effect had been a volunteering role at an elementary school, and now that I’ve been able to interact with young kids and older adults, I can see that each generation has something important to teach and share.
As for the future, I have many new things to consider thanks to this project. Now that I’ve briefly experienced volunteering at a place like The Madison, I can think deeply about what I liked and struggled with in my role. Not only would this experience help me decide what I might do in the future as a career–maybe healthcare, or caregiving! But, this project will also impact things like my future projects, whether I’ll decide to continue volunteering next year, or even if I decide to do some volunteer work in a similar setting.
This action most likely only had a local impact thus far, but I hope that the impact I made had been valuable to those I helped. For the most part, my volunteer role had impacted the residents of The Madison–like the woman I played bingo with, and helped! But, my role had also helped the staff, they often didn’t have enough people to help each resident, but with my help and my partner’s, we were able to meet and assist more residents. This was really nice since it took some stress off both the staff, and the residents, who may get anxious or frustrated if they felt helpless or struggling. I hope that my experience and blog posts may inspire someone to try volunteering in the future, but right now, I’m glad that I had such an incredible opportunity!
Thank you for reading!
