Internship: Community Service

Korrin B.

July 31, 2010 - 7:15 PM

During our Question and Answer session with the Carters last week, our Educational Programs intern did a short presentation on all of our behalf as a way to give the Carters our thank you gift. As a thank you to the Carters, each session of interns perform some sort of service to the community or to the world that acts out the humanitarian focus of The Center. This session, it was hard to agree on one service project to perform, so the interns gave the Carters several gifts. Some of the gifts included donating to Heifer International to buy a water buffalo for a family in the Philippines, creating care packages to be sent to our troops overseas, and putting in service hours to help clean up Atlanta's Piedmont Park.

The fourth gift was one that I participated in last Wednesday. A large group of us went to put in some service hours with the nonprofit, Global Soap Project (http://www.globalsoap.org/). The Global Soap Project is a nonprofit organization in Atlanta that takes all of the gently used bars of soap from local hotels, disinfects them, melts them down, reshapes them, and then sends the new bars to refugees around the world. Its goal is to promote improved hygiene and comfort for some of the world's poorest people and to prevent the spread of disease by simple hand washing programs. The Global Soap Project is a very unique idea and helps to reuse an otherwise enormous amount of waste from the hotel industry.

We were lucky enough to have the founder of the organization at the volunteer event with us. His name is Derreck Kayongo and he happened to work for The Carter Center previously to his current positions with CARE International and the Global Soap Project. He was very excited to be working with Carter Center interns. It was nice to listen to him speak about his organization as well and hear how passionate he is about his work and the work of others to help improve the lives of the world's "forgotten." Derreck was very open and friendly and I got the chance to talk with him a little about how he started his organization and past experiences he has had in the nonprofit industry.

The warehouse in which we were working was just about 100 degrees. All of the interns, myself included, were sweating in ways we probably never knew we could. Groups of us were placed at different stations throughout the production process and despite the heat, we continued to work, putting in about three service hours each. My friend and I were placed at the point of production where sanitized soaps are crushed up into small pieces to be put into the machine that melts them to prepare for reshaping.

At the end of our volunteer time, we had produced around 4,500 bars of soap to be sent to refugees around the world. Derreck pointed out the significance to us by saying that the number directly represented 4,500 people we were helping. Despite being incredibly overheated and smelling of a combination of soap and awful, I left feeling pretty good about being a part of this effort.

I love to learn about tiny nonprofits like this that are out there making a big difference. This was actually some of the first soap productions of the young nonprofit. It has taken some time to get the organization set up and it was only in the past two weeks that it was able to start making the soap. I was able to relate some of what I learned about this new nonprofit with courses I have taken for my Nonprofit Administration minor at the UO on what it takes to start a successful nonprofit. I definitely think that the Global Soap Project has found its niche in Atlanta.