Et cetera : NCCC FEMA Corps Team Hickory Two Supports Boys and Girls Club

Hickory 2 jumps for joy outside the Boys and Girls Club after a successful Community Day

Andrew Nellenbach

On Thursday, May 16 and Friday, May 17 National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) FEMA Corps team Hickory 2, in partnership with the Wakeman Boys & Girls Club Smilow-Burroughs Clubhouse, organized a supplemental learning experience to their after-school program in Bridgeport, Conn. The group of service-oriented young adults and community volunteers spent the late afternoons in the classrooms performing fun, engaging and educational experiments.

The group of about 150 students (grades three to seven) spent the afternoon learning a variety of experiments that incorporate S.T.E.M. (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) education. The experiments included an engineering and teambuilding project involving building the highest marshmallow tower, a cryptography presentation with cipher wheels that implements mathematics, a slime experiment that explains how polymers work, an edible land fill presentation that explores decomposition and environmental impact and a milk tie-dye experiment investigating the science behind liquid density and surface tension.

Wakeman Boys & Girls Club is proud of the high quality programs and services they offer their members, which would not be possible without the support of hundreds of volunteers including the NCCC-FEMA Corps team. Laura Magnotta, the Club’s program director, was very excited about how “amazing the event was,” mentioning several times that “the kids seemed very excited and took something away from the experiments.”

Given the nature of their work serving in FEMA’s remote Field Office, the NCCC-FEMA Corps members haven’t found many chances to work with youth. As such, this came as a welcome change of pace in work setting and work style for the young adults involved. Corps member Jack Spivey stated, “I really liked working with such a high energy youth group. They were all super excited about our experiments and were a blast to work with. It was a positive contrast in our daily service.”