For juniors and seniors who are involved in the National Honor Society (NHS), they are required to have at least ten hours of school and community service. This makes students give back to their community whether they want to or not. There are a handful of students in GHS who don’t need anyone to tell them to volunteer; they simply want to help, so they joined the Service Club.
Service Club is open to all freshmen through seniors who would like to make a positive impact on the school and community. Junior Avery Leibman has made that impact on the community. When she was a freshman, her morals and her “why not” mindset led her to become an active member of the club.
“My personal mission is just to help people,” Leibman said. “My faith tells me that I need to get out there and feed the hungry and clothe the naked and all the things, but I just wanted to find a way to volunteer.”
Leibman’s own morals brought her here, and the club’s mission statement reflects what she believes in and tries to practice every day. That mission statement reads, “Gretna s
Service clubs are dedicated to the highest quality of community service delivered to the Gretna community through understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness.”
The club does not have a huge number of students involved, but the members active in the club are dedicated to following that statement. The club is also encouraging and welcoming to anyone and everyone who has an interest in joining. Itmeets every other Wednesday and works to volunteer at one or more service projects a month.
The group is active in volunteer work, such as the ACC holiday market, which is a chance for special needs students to shop for presents for their friends and families. They also assist at Hillcrest, a local food bank and recently helped the Gretna Public Library with their annual HalloWeRead. They continue to brainstorm and search for new places and people to help.
“I do think that we do it for the good of the people,” Liebman said. “A lot of our service projects, you get to interact with people that you’re helping, and it’s really nice to see that what you’re doing is actually affecting people, not just you.”
As Liebman and the other members work to get out into the community to help those in need, they see that their hard work pays off. Not only helping those in need, but in the end, it betters themselves as people.
Club advisor Macy Pinion not only sees this in her service club representatives, but she also believes that anyone could show empathy and feel the internal encouragement of helping others. She advocates for all Gretna students to join, so they can hopefully help themselves, their peers and society.
“If you can do something that directly improves not only people of your community’s lives, but internally yours, it’s kind of this bucket-filling sensation,” Pinion said.
Along with multiple other members of the service club, they are at the meetings and volunteer work because they want to be. Pinion preaches this as well and agrees that many of her members are there for that purpose.
“I really want Service Club to be something that students are volunteering and not required to do a certain number of hours, so they’re volunteering because they want to, not necessarily because they have to,” Pinion said.
