QUEST Serves is one of the seven student-led organizations that is dedicated to provide QUEST students with opportunities to get involved outside of the classroom. They focus on getting students involved in their community, helping students to plan events internally with QUEST as well as get involved in other charitable events in the community. I was able to sit down and talk with Ryan Goodman (Cohort 36), one of the leads for QUEST Serves, to get caught up on everything that QUEST Serves has already done this year and the events that are still coming up.
Ryan Goodman is a senior studying Finance from just outside of Philadelphia. One of the first few things we were able to talk about when we sat down was about why he joined QUEST Serves in the first place. “Ryan [Gerbes] (Cohort 33) was my inspiration. He always had an amazing passion and an energy.” It was Gerbes who helped Goodman find his community within QUEST (outside of his cohort) by getting Ryan involved in QUEST Serves. Goodman also said, “It is just such a rewarding experience to have a way to give back to the school.”
That’s exactly what Goodman and the QUEST Serves team has done this year. In the fall, they started partnering with the Food Recovery Network on campus. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Food Recovery Network, they are an on-campus organization that works with dining halls to make sure that any food that is not eaten from the dining halls is donated to people in need. This year, the QUEST Serves team worked with the Food Recovery Network to make sure that no food from QUEST events went to waste. Any food that was not finished at the QUEST conference was donated to the Food Recovery Network. QUEST Serves has built a good relationship with them and plans on donating food from all events to the Food Recovery Network in the future. That’s not all! They also were able to partner with the National Institute of Health around Halloween time. Students all came to the QUEST lab to create Halloween crafts that were all donated to the NIH to be distributed around the community.
QUEST Serves NIH Event
This semester, they recently worked with Caring Kids. It is an after-school program that works with 7-12 year old children. QUEST Serves students came in and explained their college experiences, what a major is, and some of the opportunities students have when they come to college. They then led the students in an egg drop activity where the students needed to come up with a way to drop an egg from more than 10 feet without it breaking using the materials provided.
They still have some opportunities to help this semester that you can look forward to. On Earth Day, they are planning a clean-up event where they will be going around and cleaning up the local College Park community. They are also planning an event with Comfort Cases, where they will be helping pack school supplies to donate to local students in the PG County community. They will be hosting a drive to collect school supplies for the event at the end of the semester. If you have school supplies that you are not using, please consider participating in this event!
If you are interested in getting involved then you are in luck! (P.S. Happy St. Patty’s Day). They have a group bulletin board that anyone can join. QUEST students will post in there random service events that they are volunteering at and can invite others to join. Please feel free to follow this link to join the group chat: Click on this link.
Additionally, if you want to join the QUEST Serves team, please reach out to Ryan. “It is a great leadership opportunity. Everyone on our team helps lead one service event from start to finish. It is fun, low commitment, and a great way to build your QUEST community outside of your cohort!”