Volunteer Spotlight – Samantha
When one of our volunteers goes above and beyond to help Baltimore, we want to recognize them for their efforts and contributions. We will feature these all-star volunteers in a blog post on our site that will describe the work they did that made them worthy of recognition in what we will be calling our Volunteer Spotlight. For our first Volunteer Spotlight, we want to share the impact Samantha Gendler had with Greater Baltimore Urban League and the students they serve.
GBUL has a Saturday Leadership Program for 8th-12th graders and each week they learn new skills that will prepare them for college, work and life. Volunteering Untapped helped with the students at one of these events. We were to assist in creating resumes and play the role of “boss” in mock interview sessions. Samantha created the entire lesson for that day and it was so good that GBUL will be incorporating her exercises and instruction into their SLP program for many years to come. The day of the event, she did all of the training with the students and ran through a Powerpoint she made for her lesson with steps for creating an effective resume all before our volunteers even got there. She also provided the volunteers with resume templates to guide the students and a few sets of mock interview questions. She put in a tremendous amount of time and effort and each of the students benefited from the lessons she taught, advice she gave and take-home sheets she created. The work she put in and impact she had with the students at our event was probably best summed up by Estelle Young, the Director of New Initiatives for GBUL, who sent an email to us after an event planning session in the days leading up to our volunteer activity. The subject heading of the email was “Samantha is AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Samantha is the one in the middle in the blue shirt and black jacket)