Interesting event prep tasks

Care Force works on many events during our year of service and that includes a lot of event preparation work or as we call it “prep”. Most events require similar prep tasks: sketching murals, taping and tarping floors and wall fixtures, measuring and cutting lumber. On certain occasions, we have the opportunity to learn a new prep task that we don’t perform as often. Or maybe it is a pretty standard prep task, like the ones listed above, but there’s a special twist. An example of this is for Project 351’s event in January 2020. I needed to find a way to hole punch 600 snack sized bags. The hole punchers I first tried didn’t work, so I needed to get creative. I stuck a giant screw through a piece of wood and pressed the bag down over it and viola there was the hole. With this is mind, I asked the team to reflect on their year of service and come up with their own example.

Sometimes our prep tasks for an event are completed while we’re in the office. Here is one about finding quotes for some rubber mulch.

“For the Aramark Dallas event, Hugh contacted the team for support with various tasks. One such task was getting quotes on rubber mulch to put on a playground. Molly Rogers took up the assignment, and I supported her in calling one of the vendors. She said that she liked the way my voice sounded during the call and “volun-told” me to call three more places for quotes. I don’t typically reach out to people myself during prep, so it was interesting to be engaged in information gathering. Also, Molly’s reaction to my professional phone voice was just entertaining to me.” –

– Brittany Blackerby

The following are some prep tasks examples that were done during the year at specific events focusing more on Hard Skills that took place at service sites :

“An interesting prep task I had to do was to caulk all the holes and cracks in these old wooden garage doors that we were painting murals on for Emerson Collective’s event in East Palo Alto. I had never used a caulk gun before, and I ended up really enjoying it. I’m quite detail-oriented so it was a fun challenge to find all the holes that needed to be filled and help make the garage doors look as good as they possibly could. The transformation of those doors was amazing to see and made the work I put into them 100% worth it!”

– Delaney Pummill

“Power washing garage doors in East Palo Alto, California, for the Emerson Collective event”

– Nana Boateng

“An interesting prep task I had was having to cut ramboard out on the blacktop at a school while students played catch with a football over my head and ended up hitting me in the head with the ball. I was cutting the ramboard to create a stencil for a mural.”

– Molly Rogers

“Using a sod cutter on the muddy soil of a farm in Minneapolis was very difficult, but rewarding. Using a sod cutter on the dry, loose soil in San Jose was much easier, but kicked up a lot of dust. For both projects, I cut sod so that we could create an outdoor classroom.”

– Masaki Carty

“In San Jose night sketching a mural was a different experience for sure.” – Johanny Tejada

Care Force has taken me and my team to many different places and throughout those places even at the office we have learned so many skills that we can take with us when we graduate.