Veronica Qiu

Students sign up for the mailing list at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center’s booth during Palo Alto High School’s annual Service and Wellness Fair at lunch Wednesday on the Quad. According to sophomore co-president of the Paly YCS Club Tessa Berney, who helped coordinate the event, the fair provided a beneficial opportunity for both organizations and students. “One of their [the organizations’] main problems is that they can’t really reach students, so this is a perfect way for them to communicate with Paly students and for Paly students to figure out how they can help the community,” Berney said.

Students flocked to more than 20 booths advertising volunteer and community service opportunities in this year’s annual Service and Wellness Fair hosted by Palo Alto High School’s YCS-Interact Club during lunch on Wednesday at the Quad.

According to Aubrey Parke, high school programs manager of Youth Community Service, the fair aims to help both students and local organizations. 

“It’s great for the community organizations because they get face-to-face time with students,” Parke said. “It can be really hard when they’re busy doing important work on their causes, whether that be animal justice or environmental rights or working in the housing crisis, it’s hard to have time to find volunteers. It’s also great for students because instead of having to guess online about what you want to volunteer you can actually dialogue back and forth with a community leader.”

The Rotary Club of Palo Alto, an organization dedicated to providing various services to the youth, environmental, health and other community service, hosted a booth during the fair. Rotary committee member Manon Janssen said that her main goal of the event was to recruit more students interested in doing community service and to establish a greater presence in the student population. 

“We are trying to enlist people to provide more service and get them started young,” Janssen said. “We have a lot of connections with the schools and the community to do service projects, so this is one of the activities we do every year. We’d like to get as many people signed up as possible so we can get some momentum and excitement and engagement from students.”

According to sophomore Tessa Berney, co-president of Paly YCS-Interact Club, the club is looking to enlarge its events in the future and to expand their exposure within the community to reach more students. 

“This year, we had a lot more people come, and overall, that was what we tried to do — increase the number of organizations and increase the number of students that come.”

Freshman Asaf Milman said that he was able to find a variety of impactful service opportunities from the service fair. 

“I was going around and discovering the different volunteer opportunities,” Milman said. “They’re mostly trying to help people in less-fortunate communities or help the environment.”

According to junior Annika Chu, the event allowed her to explore all the community offers in terms of service and volunteer opportunities. 

“It’s great that organizations can come so we can explore so many different opportunities,” Chu said. “I know that a lot of times I need extra volunteer hours, and being able to hear about these other organizations and learn more about their programs and what they can do can be really helpful for me.”