Maggie- Urban Ecology- Day One

This is the first day of me volunteering at urban ecology center. It was a great day! Everyone in our alternative spring break team had fun! We arrived to the ecology center at nine in the morning, Magenh, the volunteer coordinator thoroughly introduced the history of this ecology center and its mission. We got to know that the purpose of having this ecology center is to change the dangerous/criminal environment by helping the park gaining more public accessibility. This ecology center has been here for twenty years; today, this place appears as a friendly public accessible educational and recreational park. The local community did a great job on saving this park and utilizes the natural resources to make this community a better place.

Magenh gives us a tour of this ecology center in the morning; she showed us the activities people could do in the center and in the park. What impresses me the most was the idea of energy saving is expressed in every part of this building. Everyone in this ecology center is highly aware of energy saving. Magenh introduced to us that the wood that used to build center was from a type of fast growing tree from the local tree farm; they uses solar panels to save energy; they collect rain water to flash the toilet and to water their garden; their windows are facing to the sun’s direction so that they could use sun light to substitute the electricity lights; they uses stairs instead of elevator. There are many more examples of saving energies in this ecology center. I was so impressed by how much they do to save the natural environment.

We met many staffs in the UEC. They seem very happy of working at this ecology center. They all love the center. My impression of the non-profit world used to be a structured working environment. People come to work nine to five Monday to Friday. However, at here people seem to have a lot of fun at work. They work in a flexible working schedule and they love to hang out at the center even when they are off work.

At the afternoon, we worked on our first project—wax ski boards. It was a great teamwork! We divided our team members into a process lines, which contains four stations: two people put on the wax, two people scrape the extra wax, then the other two people buffer the waxed ski board, and last but not least we have one person to keep record and to arrange the ski boards. We were very efficient; we waxed as much the ski boards as we could until we run out of the wax. We learned how to wax ski board today and we experience our first team work! It was a wonderful day for all of us. Not only is me, the whole team is so excited for tomorrow’s work in the ecology center!