The Opportunity Statue

Thursday as we all met for Social Services day. We started the morning off with a team building meeting. We discussed the Habitude we would be focusing on throughout the day, which was the Opportunity Statue. This Habitude was to teach us to grab a hold of your opportunities while you can because once they pass by there is no going back. We used this Habitude to see the opportunities each organization had to take that we visited that day. Our first stop was in Avon Park, at NuHope Diamond Farmhouse Kitchen. Here we participated in a bonding activity with the senior citizens of the program. We started off with a question we were given to discuss to show that through getting to know one another we have more similarities than we may have thought. After finishing up in Avon Park we traveled back to Sebring and visited Hope Haven Transitional Housing. The location we stopped at was not a place to walk into like we all were thinking, it was actually the site where their foundation is going to start a new group of tiny houses for individuals to live in. We learned that this organization is a non-profit organization that houses those who are homeless and want to make a change in their life for the better. We heard many stories of people who have excelled throughout the program and even how some struggles led to the reason the program is available today. Our next stop was at New Testament Mission, a local non-profit organization that feeds the less fortunate in our community. We had the privilege of being able to help during lunch time by passing out personal hygiene items and serving food. After lunch we learned all about how this organization was started in a time where there was a lot of hardship in our community and it grew into what it is today. After finishing at New Testament Mission we headed off to New Concepts by Visions which was by far, my favorite part of the day. We were placed with a group of clients and at each table we helped them decorate Christmas cookies, when we finished those, we got to help make a craft with them. I enjoyed the opportunity interacting with and getting to know the group of clients I spent time with. We ended the day at Samaritan’s Touch Care Center, which is a non-profit organization that provides medical care for those in the community who may not be able to afford or get care themselves. We rotated in groups seeing all the different aspects that this organization provides for our local community. In all we got to see a different side from our previous day out, we saw how many people in our local community who have struggled and, yet, made something good from it.