Project Podcast

Fabio Chiriniants is a second-year student at GCC majoring in business administration. He has worked as an after-school tutor for new students and currently works at the Glendale Community College Welcome Center. He joined the College Corps program to help his community and gain volunteering experience. He is placed at the Glendale Food Bank, where he checks expiration dates, bags groceries, and helps distribute food to those in need. He faces challenges with language barriers but works as a team with his fellow volunteers. He believes that service is important and plans to continue supporting the food bank. He has learned the importance of staying humble and helping those in need. The College Corps program has been a great experience for him. Hello everyone, my name is Fabio Chiriniants and I'm a second year student in GCC majoring in business administration. When it comes to work and volunteering, I worked at my high school, which is Herbert Hoover High School, and I worked as an after-school tutor for students who were new to the country and needed extra support with their schoolwork. I'm also currently working at the Glendale Community College Welcome Center, which I really like. Earlier this year, I was introduced to the College Corps program, which as soon as I gained more knowledge of, I was immediately interested in. I signed up for the College Corps program because I saw this as a great opportunity to help my community out and to gain experience in the volunteering field. My job site is called Glendale Food Bank. The name of my supervisors are Derek and Arutin. Over the past few months, I've been able to build a fantastic relationship with my supervisors as we share a lot in common. Glendale Food Bank is a fairly new non-profit organization, which opened earlier this year actually. I'm very excited to be a part of the first group of fellows to help grow this non-profit organization. Glendale Food Bank is a site which is similar to GCC Cares located at GCC. Just like GCC Cares, Glendale Food Bank gets food donations from a variety of different grocery stores, such as Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and etc. We basically pack the foods from these grocery stores and then we hand it out to the people who are in need. At first, when I was placed at a food bank, I was kind of worried because I never had experience dealing with food products, but thanks to my great supervisors, I was able to quickly learn the tasks we do almost every day when we volunteer. The typical task I have at Glendale Food Bank is checking expiration dates for the food items, bagging grocery items, and taking down information of people who pick up food donations and handing out the food to the people who come to the food bank. We write down people's information in order to provide an equal opportunity to the community to come pick up food items. This process allows us to know if someone comes and picks up food twice during one day. Overall, I really enjoy volunteering at my site because I truly feel good about helping out the community. Since Glendale Food Bank does not have a specific location, we volunteer at public spaces such as parks near Glendale, La Crescenta, and Burbank. Some of these parks are Verdugo Park and Brand Park. As an example, since I volunteer at these parks, there is a certain homeless individual who always visits our site for help. I remember meeting him for the first time. He was telling me about the challenges that he faces on a daily basis. He also was very thankful for our service since it really helps him out. Ever since the first day he visited our site, he's been visiting us regularly every week. Speaking about the site, I work with four other College Corps Fellows that are volunteering at my site. It's been a great experience so far. I got to meet them and build a friendship. I think that a great friendship allows us to work together hard as a team for the community. Although we run everything smoothly as a team, there are of course challenges we face sometimes. A challenge I experienced myself as a College Corps Volunteer is that understanding some of the languages that are spoken by the people who come to pick up food from Glendale Food Bank. There are many times that I had to ask for my fellows, volunteers, to come and help me out because people who came to pick up food donations were Spanish speakers and I don't speak that language myself so I had to reach out for help from my fellows and yeah, they helped me and it was perfect. I think that this is a great example of teamwork in order to provide a great service. Speaking of service, given the variety of difficulties people encounter in today's world, including financial difficulties, service is very important in my opinion. In order to support the community, it is very important to be aware of people's situations. I believe that serving is a good deed and it is a very selfless act that many people can go out of their way to do in order to help their community. Clarifying my own values is very important because it helps me better understand who I am and how to relate to those who are going through tough times in life. I also have the ability to speak and treat people with greater efficiency as a result of this. My job site is currently dealing with making a system for people who regularly get food donations from us to be able to set up a reoccurring appointment every week in order to stay on a stable schedule. I'm also helping my site update the existing website which we have and I'm trying to create a spot that we can send out QR codes or put out QR codes for people to scan which makes it a lot easier to set up reoccurring appointments to pick up food from the food bank. With all this said, I definitely believe that I made a difference by joining the College Corps program and being placed on my job site. Since my volunteering site is fairly new, I'm working with my supervisors and helping them grow the name of the food bank in order for the people of the community to be aware of the help we provide. For the second half of my service, I plan on continuing to work hard at my site trying to help my supervisors grow the name of Glendale Food Bank so that everyone in the community knows what we're doing and they can come and pick up food if they're in need. And I believe that food insecurity is definitely a topic that needs to be discussed more and it is very serious due to prices of groceries skyrocketing throughout the past few years along with inflation. I believe that service will become a part of my life even after College Corps because In this program, I learned that many people are truly in need of help and by doing small things it can make their lives a lot easier. Last but not least, the biggest lesson I learned as a College Corps fellow is that I must stay humble at all times no matter how hard life gets. By joining this program, I learned that people truly need the extra help and the worries that they might have I never thought I would have in my life. I also learned to listen and understand people's situations since not everyone lives a privileged lifestyle. At last, I learned to help anyone who is in need because even if it takes a little amount of time and effort from my end, it can truly help certain individuals and make their lives a lot easier. Overall, the whole College Corps program has been an amazing experience for me and yeah, thank you for listening.