Lakes & Prairies staff visited Minnesota State University - Moorhead and talked to Dr. Steve Bolduc's Economics and Women's Studies 305AM -- Poverty, Discrimination, Inequality class about Service Learning opportunities. Already, 2 students have contacted us about the opportunities available -- one about the tax site and the other about working with low income and special needs students.
Opportunities available include:
- Tax Site Assistance (Tuesday and Thursday evenings) either from 5-7 or 7-9 p.m. This opportunity includes greeting clients, offering to do a benefits analysis of what services or programs families may be eligible for, and/or providing clients with the completed tax papers and having them sign. Opportunities are available with some Saturday opportunities as well. Contact.
- A Minnesota Without Poverty event (Saturday, February 27 evening). Help is needed at the event and in some pre-planning and promotion in early February. Contact.
- Project Homeless Connect event (April 6th training and April 7th providing services and assistance to homeless individuals and families. At the last event more than 500 people in need of assistance attended. Services ranges from food, haircuts, dental care, and helping people to get a drivers license, to connecting people with employment and housing assistance services. In all, more than 100 volunteers are needed. Students who volunteer on April 7th must attend the evening training on April 6th. Students volunteering as part of a service learning project should indicate their interest in Frebruary. Training is about 2 to 3 hours and the day of the event will have 3 hour shifts including 9 a.m. - noon; noon to 3 p.m and 3 p.m - 6 p.m. Contact.
Other opportunities include working in the following Lakes & Prairies programs. These programs include:
- Head Start is a state and federally funded program for children ages 3 and 4. The program offers comprehensive services to enroll children and families, giving priority to limited income families and children with special needs. Volunteering can include work in the classroom with teachers or helping with special events.
- Rainbow Bridge - Safe Exchange and Visitation Center provide safe exchanges and monitored visits for parents/guardians visiting their children. Training for this is about 3 hours and each visit is about 2 hours. Those volunteering should be able to commit to 18 hours of visitations and exchanges. Hours for this can be some afternoons, evenings and weekends.
- Family & Community Services programs work in a number of areas including homelessness prevention, food support, heathcare application assistance, self-sufficiency, and asset development.
All of these can be found on our website.
Please mail your interest to info@lakesandprairies.net and we will pass along your interest to the appropriate staff members. If, for any reason, you haven't had some response after 3 workdays after you contacted us, please send a second email and we will follow up. This should not happen but everything from snow days, to out of office meetings can occur and we will be happy to respond to a second request. (We don't expect that will happen too often.)
