H-Club Switches up Activities

Instead of going around the community in-person, H-Club members will instead be sharing recordings of story readings with the surrounding K-8 school districts.

This change is in correspondence with COVID-19, but by making this adaptation to the events that the club member participate in, the students are still able to reach out to the community. H-Club advisor Kristen Helms came up with the idea as a method to still be able to reach out to the community.

“As a service club, we still want to be able to reach out and make an impact on our K-8 districts,” Helms said. “I just got to thinking like [reading stories and sending a recording to the schools] would be a way that we could really reach out to all the districts and everyone could participate safely.”

The idea was well received by the surrounding K-8 districts as Helms said that the signup sheet was shared with the K-8 administrators “within a half hour” and teachers were already putting in their information for the stories they would like.

H-Club vice president Maci Meyer was upset that she would not be able to participate in the regular H-Club activities, such as Operation Christmas Child or the Shamrock Shuffle and interact directly with the community, but is glad that there is still a way for her and the other members to make an impact.

“Not being able to go into the community directly breaks my heart [because] I love seeing the smiling faces of people when H-Club helps them with whatever they need,” Meyer said. “We are still finding ways to help the community as much as we can with everything that is going on right now.”

Although this was originally planned to be an activity that H-Club members could participate in without directly interacting with the community, Helms hopes that this activity will be able to take a bit of pressure off of the teachers as well.

“A side benefit of [the activity] is just to kind of help the teachers out and just to give them a moment where they’re able to step back and we can take some of the pressure off of them, even if it’s just for a few minutes, just to get the kids engaged in something different,” Helms said.

This year is junior Connor Martin’s first year as an H-Club member. While volunteering is important to Martin, he understands that due to the current circumstances, he would not be able to interact with people as much as he may have wanted to.

“My favorite type of service is those that allow me to interact with others [and] with COVID-19 playing a major role in our lives and what we are able to safely participate in, the ability to volunteer in the community has been a challenge for our group,” Martin said. “While I am sad to not be able to physically go out into the community for interaction, I am fortunate to have opportunities like Ozzy's Book Club that can be done virtually. Without technology, our ability to do many of the things we are doing would look much different and might not even be able to happen. ”

The finished recordings of the stories are to be sent out to the schools in December, right before Christmas break.