My experience with Into the Streets was surprising, to say the least.

To begin with, I wasn’t entirely sure what the event consisted of when I planned on signing up. I found out that it had to do with volunteering in the community once I was in the process of signing up and trying to complete the paperwork to take part in the event. Some of my friends had also signed up to do the event, so I thought that we might be in the same place to volunteer. In the end, the group I went to was assigned to the YMCA outdoor site, and I was placed in a group of entirely new people.

Having just been told that I would be volunteering at the YMCA, I thought that we would be at a building, possibly clearing up the front of leaves. The farther the bus went, the more we realized that our destination was not what we had expected. Despite the unexpected nature of the event, my group as a whole had a good experience.

We were tasked with cleaning up the “playground”. When we first saw it, we didn’t know that it was the playground that they had been talking about on our walk to the clearing. There were just a few short tree trunks and long branches scattered around. The one that was assigning the tasks to each groups told us that he wanted the playground to look like a sun, which was the extent of the guidelines we received.

As a group, we were able to decide what we wanted to do to accomplish the end that had been established for us. With this goal in mind, we were able to organize the stumps and branches into something that we thought kids would want to play with. We also added our own ideas to the organization of the playground.

While we went through making the playground, I was able to talk to my group members, which was composed of freshman through juniors and even a grad students. We were able to talk about different aspects of living and studying at Cornell, which was a good way for us to feel more comfortable with each other while we went through the process. In the end, we were all very happy with the results, especially since we were able to make something out of what used to look more disorganized. Since we were able to see concrete result, we could see what we were doing to help the community.

The experience was very rewarding. It was great being able to volunteer outside while the weather was still nice and being surrounded by the woods. Not only was I able to see the end results of my time there, I met new people through my group. It was great working with people that were aiming for the same goal, as well as being people that were easy to get along with. I think that I would enjoy being able to be a part of it again in the upcoming years, and look forward to what else I might be able to do.