From this project, I gained valuable insights that I can include in future aspects of my life, despite encountering challenges such as the unavailability of nurses for check-ups and lower-than-expected turnout during the pop-up food pantry event. My partners and I were able to persevere and develop solutions. I believe this was due to the clear project idea I had before beginning my planning stage. By knowing what my mission was with the creation of a short-term impact of providing immediate assistance. Additionally, the long-term impact building off of my efforts from the last council term and supplying further resources, we provided people with resource pages for future help from social workers and other food pantries in the area. Furthermore, all the packaged donations were distributed out into the community, just not as immediately as expected. Reflecting back, just because my original plan was not executed in the same vision that I had hoped, all of my goals were reached. I was also able to fulfill my goal of overall positively impacting my community for the better firsthand and empowering students from my school to do the same!

Through this project, I gained skills that will help me in the real world for instance: how to handle rejection. I had emailed schools in my community that I wanted to join the food drive, but they could not because the schools were hosting other donation drives that were happening at the same. From that, I learned not to dwell. Instead, I made the best of what I could! Another lesson I learned from this project was how to branch out. Reaching out to non-profit organizations can be scary! So when I reached out to Maggie's Marketplace and discovered that they were excited about the possibility of having more recognition in the Washtenaw County area and receiving more donations to help those in need. I was ecstatic, and Maggie's Marketplace became my non-profit organization partner. From the planning with Maggie's Marketplace, I was able to fulfill the goals that I had set for my project to educate youth about food insecurity from a professional, host a three-week-long food drive, and have an event to sort through the food drive donations.