Throughout my time at OSC, I’ve fulfilled my service requirement by participating in the Housing and Habitat service group. Uplift has been our main, ongoing project for about 3 years. Every Thursday after school, our group is either planning our annual 5k run, Homerun, or down in our workshop converting wooden palettes into chairs and tables that will then be donated to a local preschool.

With the close of the first semester of my last year in this service, spending time reflecting on my participation seemed like a good idea. When I first joined, I had little to no knowledge of power tools and making furniture so I relied heavily on the upperclassmen. But by the end of freshman year, it was my job to teach these exact skills to the incoming members. Luckily, I was well-prepped. In fact, I discovered something of a random talent operating the saw.

As one of the upperclassmen members and one of the longest participating members, my contribution this year was significantly heavier weighted. At this point in the year, I think our service has made lots of progress on Project Uplift especially. We finally finished pulling apart the wooden palettes. Previously, the amount of in-tact palettes built up and we were struggling to pull them apart in order to make space for the actual building.

Although Homerun got postponed from its usual date in the first semester of school to its current one in the second semester, our planning sessions for it were more constructive than previous years. Hopefully this will mean improved organization during the actual event.

In terms of improvements in the running of Housing, I think we really need to establish a more concrete assembly process for Project Uplift. Disorganization in this case slows us down a lot. We’re slowly becoming more organized and having more set roles but there is still work to be done in order to improve efficiency.