I help out with a variety of tasks at my placement with Children’s Hospital Volunteer Services. This has included : playing with kids, holding NICU babies, greeting people, running the high school volunteer program, and some clerical work. Playing with kids, interacting with employees, and helping families navigate the hospital has been been very rewarding. Clerical work can be rewarding as well. A big task I’ve acquired recently was transferring all the old volunteer paper files to the computer and uploading them. I was very excited to hear this was happening. One of the first things I noticed while doing clerical tasks was the considerable amount of paper files. It was easy for me to think of how unsustainable and inefficient that was, but I had to remind myself of the extensive amount of time and resources it takes to switch from paper to computer. Especially when years of documentation had been collected on paper.
To get this accomplished, a few days were dedicated to removing staples from all the stacks of volunteer files. Most of this week was spent scanning and uploading these files to the computer. It has been very satisfying to help with this task. I am glad I can be a part of creating a more efficient system for my supervisor and saving some trees in the process.