By: Rocelyn Miller
For my community service, I helped paint a house. This house was a part of our Paint Dodge Program. To apply for a Paint Dodge Project, the homeowner must meet certain qualifications and submit an application. If picked, the homeowner gets to choose the colors and all the paint is provided for them. Paint Dodge also has a lot of volunteers that help with the painting. Paint Dodge brings the community together to help make our town look nice.
This year, Paint Dodge recruited the Bike and Builders to help with the project. Bike and Build is a nonprofit organization that has bikers from all over the world who bike across the country while also volunteering for affordable housing causes. It was so cool to get to know each of the volunteers and hear about their journey so far. It amazes me that they bike so long and still help out on different projects. Some of the other things that they do besides painting are building walls, moving dirt, putting up drywall, ect. I even keep in touch with a few of them to see how their journey is going and what they are up to.
To start off the day, the other intern and I filled up coolers with water and got all of the materials together. Then, we got to our houses and started prepping. We wiped down the house and then I went to go pick up the paint. We then started painting the house. The painting took at least 8 hours. It was over 100 degrees for most of the painting. It was very hard and hot, but overall a good experience with great people.
The last two hours of my community service were spent helping my coworkers give good hospitality to the Bike and Builders. We took them on a tour of our community and then provided snacks and a short presentation thanking them for their hard work.
I love doing community service for those in need of some assistance. Last year, we did yard work for a few people and that was very difficult because we didn’t know a lot about lawn care. Camila and I decided to partake in something different this year. Painting houses was very challenging, but worth it in the end. I forgot to take pictures of me doing the painting, but I have pictures of the other volunteers.
