The Wooster Volunteer Network Awards groups of students an on campus house in exchange for a year of service with an organization in the Wooster community. Each member of the house performs 8 hours of service a month with the house-affiliated organization. This year we awarded over fifteen program houses including:
Local Roots:
Local Roots is a food co-op downtown that works with produ
cers and farmers to provide their goods to the Wooster Community. They have three full time 
employees and run
completely on the work of volunteers who help run the cash registers, restock the store, and label the goods produ
ers bring. Our volunteers will do all of those things and reach out to the college community to advertise for the large events that occur at Local Roots around the holidays, like Halloween and Chinese New Year. Local Roots is a great place to visit when you venture downtown and it welcomes everyone interested in buying local and helping out our great community.
West View Manor House:
We volunteer at West View Healthy Living, an assisted living facility that provides service for senior citizens in all stages of life, from post-surgery recovery to permanent intensive care. We’ll be splitting off into various activities – a few of us will do one-on-one visits with residents, others will do manicures, some will deliver mail, some will play music, and some will do other activities to bond with the residents. Since we’re such a large group, we’re hoping to split into a few smaller units of people throughout the week to volunteer. This will most likely turn into a larger group on Saturday mornings, and a few smaller ones throughout the week.
Community Breakfast Program:
Each housemate volunteers at UCC Trinity once a week during the semester. At the church we help to prepare, serve, and eat a hot meal with community members. One of our main goals by doing this is to form relationships with the Wooster community.
Homework 4 Hoops:
Homework 4 Hoops runs every Tuesday from 6-8pm. We work with at-risk boys and girls from schools in Wayne County. We help them with homework for an hour and play sports with them for the second hour. The primary objective of our program is to act as positive role models, to be mentors to the kids, many of whom have very difficult family situations and some of whom are court-ordered to be there because they have been in trouble with the law.
GLOW house:
Our house has started the GLOW program in collaboration with the Girl Scouts of Ohio’s Heartland program. GLOW stands for Girl Leaders of Wooster, and is exactly that. Our goal is to provide a leadership program to school age girls in the Wooster community, while also providing them a space to conduct their Girl Scout duties. We meet every other week to plan activities and discuss other volunteer work that the girl scouts want to do. We also meet during the weekends every other week to have bigger events, that may include hiking, volunteering, or help them obtain their Girl Scout badges.