FRC Teams & Community Service

[PayneTrain]

Special Olympics, Adopt-A-Highway, Children's Miracle Network Charities, LEGO Drive, Food Drive, Book Drive, x Drive, attending events like Relay for Life, holding events for charities like Extra Life, setting up a water stop at a local marathon or 5/10k, and make sure your team shirts, your robot are there, and FIRST's name, your team name, and your sponsor names are everywhere.

[DonRotolo]

Goodness, there are thousands of volunteer opportunities out there.

Keep it local is my advice.

Ask at the local food pantry, homeless shelter, town hall/police/fire/ambulance, religious community, hospital, senior citizens center, military base, parks commission, outreach center and so on.

Start out within the team's comfort zone: If anything is not a good fit for the students/team/parents/community.etc then avoid it, at least for now. I say this because initially the idea of a homeless shelter freaked people out, but slowly they accepted it.

The basic idea is to Help people who need help. In 2007 there was some awful flooding locally, we went to the area and 50 energetic teens helped residents cart ruined stuff from their basements to the dumpster.

The goal is that when the community hears "that robot team", they think good thoughts of them.

[Mr. Pockets]

For the last two years our team has been doing an annual school supply collection (warning, we live in a rather well to do area. This may not have similar success depending on how wasteful the students in your school systems are)

We collect lightly used school supplies that students would normally be throwing out at end of the year, sort through to make sure taht all are of usable quality, and then donate them to a needy school in the area. Every year we probably collect roughly a quarter ton of usable materials for donation. Great times

[Koko Ed]

We have a page on our webpage dedicated to our community service.

[JesseK]

We help our town put on a local festival event. Then we put up our area with little robots and showcase the big bot.

Go and meet the politicians for your area too.

Other than that we have our eyes on STEM curriculum implementation. It's a challenging goal to have, but after a lot of work over many years we think we have something worthwhile.

There's a bunch of other stuff here too.

[Alex2614]

Our team built a robot (that looks like the robot in our logo) that's sole purpose is to make a presence in parades, Relay for Life, even walking dogs at the Humane Society events, etc. We also do things like running food drives at our local FLL events and participating in relay triathlons to benefit Habitat for Humanity.

Really, it depends on your community and your location. For us, things like Humane Society, 4-H, parades, etc. are HUGE, but in other areas, might not be as much. THINK ABOUT WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOUR COMMUNITY, and see if there are ways in which you can give back that benefit those areas...

Hope this helped