As my first year as a service leader ended, I have no negative words to say about the group and service work we have done so far. To recap, we started the year with ambitious expectations and fast-approaching deadlines like SAISA season 1. By designing “student-made” apparel we made our OSC SAISA athletes feel like they were a part of the process with feedback and changing our designs to what they wanted.

Our perseverance as a group helped develop the OSC community atmosphere and gave it a sense of family with almost every OSC kid, teacher, and parent owning a piece of Gecko Gear attire. We shared goals, bounced ideas off each other, and improved our products for the good of the community to make sure we could bring the OSC community closer and in turn, use our fortunate situations in life to provide for those less fortunate in the surrounding areas. For example, with our earnings we were able almost to equal the entire annual service budget for all services in the school and helped provide for other service groups like paying for the transportation costs so that other service groups had a chance to bring less economically fortunate kids on campus without worry.

Creating relationships with these kids was also important for us as a service so we divided a service session every month to joining one of the other services that brought kids onto campus so that we could build relationships with the kids we were supporting. We also helped welcome them onto campus with big smiles and walked them to their designated meeting points so that they felt apart of the community as well and not outcasted. One of the main things we did was we supplied OSC swim bags, googles, towels, and Gecko apparel to each one of the orphaned kids in SOS Village so that they would be able to learn to swim more comfortably and with a sense of community. By the end of the year, we raised over $3000 and aim to use our leftover money for our ambitious projects for next year like making our merch sustainable and environmentally friendly.