Taitym Hadaway

For the past two years I have been in Student Council with my school, and I have volunteered at multiple places in the process. During Thanksgiving, I help to run a food drive to collect food to give to families. During the week I help collect food, sort food, and make food baskets to give to the families. This is known as the TLC food drive, and I have participated for the past two years. I also volunteer my time to help run carnivals at the elementary schools in the county for the kids, along with reading to them once a year on our Student Council visit days. In October, we help gather donations of socks to give to the less fortunate, and in December we run a toy drive for the kids who are not able to receive gifts. Along with that, I volunteer my time to go and shop for Angel Tree gifts to help gather presents for children. One last big thing I volunteer my time for at county is to help clean up the school. This past Earth Day the class of 27' helped to pick up trash around the school to make it look nicer.

As a family, we like to volunteer as much time as we can. Every year my mom finds families on Facebook who are struggling during the holidays and we find out what their kids want for Christmas so we can buy them gifts. After we get an idea of what they want, me and all of my family goes shopping to shop for these kids. Along with that, I have been doing Wreaths Across America since 2016. We go up to Fort Lyon to place wreaths on Veterans graves during Christmas time to honor their service.

As an active scouting family with my brothers, I am often volunteering to help with troop events, and I have been since the year my brothers joined. Every year we do a community clean up at the city park and at th Pueblo County Fairgrounds. When my brothers were in Cub Scouts we did Scouting for Food every year where we went around to houses and asked for canned donations to donate to families for Thanksgiving. When my older brother was getting his Eagle Scout, I also helped to build a shooting range for the Pueblo Police Department. We spent about 4 days moving rock and building fences to make the shooting range useable for the department. I have also helped out at the Ecumenical Church to sort food and make boxes for families to come and collect for groceries.

While participating in 4H we did many things throughout the year to help better the community. We participated in a garden clean up for a community garden for about two years. We helped to clean up weeds, and leaves to make room to plant new plants. In the past few years we started new volunteering opportunities to give back to the community. We help to gather donations of dog food and dog items to give to local shelters, and we collect peanut butter and jelly to give to homeless shelters. We also made backpacks to give to the homeless shelters for multiple years, and we delivered them ourselves.