Big Brother Big Sister – Ben

03/09/2020 1:05 AM

Hey y’all, if you haven’t seen my bio yet, my name is Ben Herring and I am a sophomore honors biomedical science major. With that pre-dental major and being a very active member of my fraternity, I am of course very busy with my studies and many other campus activities and I was very worried that I would not have any time to continue my passion for volunteer work that I had within my high school experience. Thankfully, after successful time management and setting aside time for volunteering weekly, I have been able to do even more volunteering than ever before. I have participated in a multitude of volunteer opportunities from cleaning up campus, tutoring elementary school kids in math, and participating in a community-scale level of feed my starving children. But I want to share with y’all some of my favorites.

I am happily a member of Big Brothers Big Sisters. For those of you that do not know, this organization’s goal is to pair younger children that either do not have a good role model in their life or need friends at school with older individuals and they just hang out. This month marks the one year anniversary of me being paired up with my little brother Chriztian (this is not a typo ladies and gentleman, his name is legit spelled with a z, cool I know right) and I can honestly say it has been one of my favorite things I have ever signed up for. I walk 2 blocks and meet up with Chriztian once a week for lunch and recess for about 45 minutes and we both just have the best of times. We talk while he eats lunch then play one of the couple board games that the school provides. We talk about each others’ day, what’s going on at home, and any jokes we can think of. We then go outside and play games during recess with some of the other kids. This is an awesome thing to join, especially if you love kids as much as myself. I love seeing how much Chriztian grows and learns how to make better friends and of course the smile on his face when he sees me brightens my week every time I see him and it keeps me young. 

Another one of my favorite volunteering opportunities that I have become a part of is volunteering at TAPS, a no-kill animal shelter that is just a 20 minutes drive from campus. I have a 23lb 13-year-old cockapoo by the name of Lily Chuck Norris Herring back home and I love her to death and miss her more than my parents (just kidding ;). So I have self-diagnosed dog withdrawals and seriously need to pet dogs as often as I can. So thankfully, I became connected with TAPS and went to one of their orientations to check it out. After showing up, we got a quick debrief of what we can do there and I was instantly hooked. I can literally show up whenever and walk, play with, and pet almost any of the dogs they have. It is so much fun to hang out with such a wide variety of dogs and it has shown me how awesome other breeds are. I am a dog person myself but for all you cat people, they have cat rooms full of cats and toys that you can just walk right in and sit down and start playing with the kitties. This has been an awesome stress reliever that I can attend whenever I want.

There are many other opportunities to get involved in that I have not even got into yet myself. There is a website called volunteer.bradley.edu that any student can go to which shows all the available options to volunteer in the community with set times and locations and such. There is even a monthly serve on Saturdays that all students can participate in from 9 A.M. – 12 P.M. You sign up on the website and show up at Markin (our gym) and they transport you to the volunteer site. It’s really cool to see a lot of campus voluntarily wake up at 9 A.M. on a Saturday and go and serve instead of sleeping in. There are of course many clubs that also support and stress volunteering. All greek life encourages philanthropy and service. There is also the BUserve club that organizes the serve on Saturdays and also the Bradley Fellows which is a club based on leadership and service.

So if you are an avid volunteer and are worried that college won’t have enough resources for you to continue your passion, you’re mistaken. And maybe if you are new to volunteering and do not know where to start, just go to the website and scroll through until you find something you like to do, and go from there. I’m sure all of campus would agree with me that whenever they do serve, they never regret it and leave feeling like a better person. There’s options for everyone, let me know if you have any more questions.