Posts

Summit Park - March

Image
As we’ve mentioned in our past blogs, our community partner is the Dickerson Park Zoo and our main goal is to get more people on the Drury campus and the community to volunteer at the zoo. With that said, we are in the midst of planning many of our projects!` We have scheduled the date for a zookeeper bringing animals to campus on a Friday in April from 12:00 - 1:00 PM in the FSC Ballroom. We plan redirect students going to lunch to the ballroom for a few minutes so the zookeeper briefly educates them about the animals, and show them zoo volunteer opportunities as well. We also have planned for April 7th to have Drury students get in the zoo for free all day. We even partnered with SUB on this event so they could help us advertise, which is working out very well so far! This last Thursday, on March 22nd, Lauren, Genevieve, and I (Slamb) went to the zoo and met up with Chelsea. After catching up, she lead us to our supplies and we went to work finishing up the maze. We hung up t

Summit Park - February

As we’ve said in the past, our community partner is the Dickerson Park Zoo and our main goal is to get more people on the Drury campus and the community to volunteer at the zoo. That being said, volunteering in the winter is tough in a zoo since the weather is so unpredictable, so we have not been able to do much this month. However, we did get to meet with our community supervisor, Chelsea, and discuss our plans for the semester. The first order of business was figuring out how we will finish renovating the children’s maze. Chelsea wanted to come on a regular basis to finish it, so we decided that we would come every Thursday and work on it until it is completed, starting next week. We also decided that we would hold any future meetings with her on Thursday at the same time to make scheduling easier for both of us and limit any miscommunications. The second thing we talked about was having a college day at the zoo. We are partnering with SUB to get Drury students into the zoo for

Summit Park - November

Image
As a reminder, our community partner is the Dickerson Park Zoo, and our main goal is to get more people from the Drury campus and the community to volunteer. Our community partner has also asked us to redecorate the children’s maze, so that has been our main goal this month. Towards the beginning of the month, Genevieve and I (Lauren) got to work closely with the animals. I was assigned the Africa exhibit where I helped feed the cheetahs, bongos, ostriches, and most importantly, a red-ruffed lemur named Cordelia. That was the highlight of my trip that day as I got to go into her exhibit and distracted her from eating the other lemur’s food by scratching her arms and petting her (I kid you not though I do not have pictures to prove it). The rest of the time was spent cleaning out the hippo, giraffe, and ostrich exhibits in retrospect, I should have worn boots. The Dickerson Park Zoo even offers free housing to its interns which is very helpful to one that I met fr

Summit Park - October

Image
As we said in the last post, our community partner is the Dickerson Park Zoo, and our main goal is to get more people from Drury University and the Community to volunteer at the zoo. One of the best ways to influence others in a good way to get them to want to help out is to be the example. So, on October 29th Lauren, Genevieve, and I (Slamb) went to the zoo and volunteered from 7:30am to 2:00pm. We were all sent to different areas of the zoo and got to work with some of the zoo keepers and really experience what it's like behind the scenes of the zoo. Getting a chance to help out not only strengthened our knowledge of what all the keepers get to do but we got a chance to see how much they truly love the animals that they work with. I (Slamb) got to work with the elephants and the apes during my hours. While I was there I learned that they keep the animals of the same species together so they never get lonely. Also, that they make sure to clean each of the animals areas at

Summit Park - September

Image
Since it has only been a month, we are not very far in our Summit project, but we have done a few things to show for it. Our community partner is with the Dickerson Park Zoo, and our main goal is to try to get more people from Drury University and the community to volunteer at the zoo. Our big event we are hoping to pull off at some point in the semester is to get a zookeeper to come to campus with a few animals to get the attention of Drury students and see if they’re interested in volunteering. It is also our goal to post our own pictures on our instagram and twitter to emphasize the interaction of volunteering in the community. So far, Lauren Pyle, Lauren Slamb, and Genevieve Travers have met with our community partner, Chelsea Hoover, towards the very end of August. Chelsea gave us all a tour of the zoo, which ended up being really cool. She knew a lot of the animals by name and was very knowledgeable on all of them. It was easy to tell that she really cared for all of them.