September 11th Project with the Jewish Relief Agency

For our first service project, we worked with the Jewish Relief Agency in Northeast Philadelphia to help package and deliver food supplies to community members in need. To say the whole operation ran like a "well oiled machine" would be an understatement. Just imagine the whole operation as one big clock, with volunteers rotating around collecting food items from other volunteers then at the end giving it to other volunteers who packaged them up. All the volunteers were assigned to certain stations, making cardboard boxes or handing out food items. The Playworks team worked their way down the food assembly lines to collect items in each box. Finally, each member gave the box to the volunteers at the end of the assembly line who would package them and prepare them for delivery to the families in need.

After the Playworks Philadelphia crew was done packaging, we received our directions to the locations of apartments where we were assigned to drop off the food. This was the best part of the service project, handing out the food packages to the people. All of the people were more than thankful, and some even attempted to tip us! The majority of Northeast residents we delivered food to were immigrants from Russia and Poland who spoke little English. Although there was a slight language barrier you could still tell how thankful they all were.

Personally, I believed that September 11th was just a day for mourning and remembrance, but now after this service project I realized that we can continue to move forward and using this day to make our community and nation a better place. Written by: Alex Correa