By: Jonah Adler, Teen Service Council Participant
At 4Front, volunteering isn’t just about showing up; it’s about understanding why we serve our community.
As part of 4Front’s Teen Service Council this year, our group was tasked with creating community service events for teens in Baltimore. We got to choose what causes we care about and what organizations serving those communities we wanted to volunteer with. We spent time at our last 2 meetings learning about different social justice issues. After much discussion and learning, our group decided that food insecurity was a cause we wanted to help. We did activities to further understand food insecurity and how some families struggle to earn enough money to feed their families for even a single week. Our first service event in October was volunteering at Happy Helpers for the Homeless where we sorted and organized donations.
For our second event, when we decided where to volunteer, we didn’t just pick a place randomly. As a group, we were given time to research different places where we could volunteer. After hearing different stories and learning all different organizations, we voted together and chose Our Daily Bread, knowing it was a place where our time could truly make a difference. “For over 46 years, Our Daily Bread Employment Center [in Downtown Baltimore] has helped people in need with a daily hot meal, case management, job training, and employment counseling.”
Volunteering at Our Daily Bread will show us how serious hunger and homelessness is in our own community. It’s eye-opening to learn that people who work full-time can still struggle to afford food and shelter and that food insecurity doesn’t always look the way we expect it to.
While we are there, we will help put those lessons into perspective and remind us that hunger isn’t just a statistic; it affects real families every day. We will be helping to prep, serve and clean up their afternoon meal and sort donations.
Volunteering at Happy Helpers for the homeless brought our group closer together. Working side by side made the experiences more meaningful and showed us how powerful it is to act as a community. It reminded us that when we take the time to learn and serve together, we can create real change and be more aware of the needs around us. We hope other teens will join us in meaningful service as we volunteer at Our Daily Bread on Dec 21 from 9am-1pm. Teens can register HERE.
