Students drop in for VolunTEEN program
Salome Gvirjishvili carefully tucked egg cartons and bright green ribbon into brown paper bag craft kits.
“I like Butler, it's beautiful,” said Salome, a foreign exchange student from the country of Georgia and a senior at Butler High School. “It's so interesting to know another country's culture and understand how they live.”
Volunteering at the Butler Area Public Library is one experience Salome had during her stay in Butler.
Salome, 17, was one of the teens who dropped in Thursday at the library, 218 N. McKean St., for a volunteer session at the library's VolunTEEN program, a program that kicked off in September.
Georgia, a country situated at the crossroads where Europe meets Asia, is similar to Butler, said Salome, who is visiting the United States for the first time as part of the Future Leaders Exchange Program.
Her senior year is off to a great start with the friends and kind teachers she has met at the school, she said, adding people usually confuse Georgia with the U.S. state.
“It's a small country, but it's so historical and so pretty,” she said.
In addition to watching Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Pirates games, Salome visited the library in Butler for the first time last week.
During that library visit, she found out about the VolunTEEN program and decided to volunteer, Salome said.
The volunteer sessions are open to those in grade four to high school seniors, said Tiffany Harkleroad, youth services librarian.
The drop-in volunteer sessions offer teens a chance to work on small projects to help the library, while hanging out with their friends and aims to improve the civic and social literacy of teens by helping them get involved in their community.When Harkleroad came to the library three years ago, there was a Teen Advisory Board of about 15 members, she said.Most of the teens in the group expressed they wanted to volunteer at the library with friends, she said.Instead of a board, the library transformed it into a volunteer program with a drop-in model, Harkleroad said.Another part of the program is socializing, she said.“It's as much an opportunity for them to hang out and have a positive experience at the library as it is for the library to benefit from having additional volunteers,” she said.The next session is from 4 to 6 p.m. Nov. 7.The experience Salome gained from volunteering lends itself to her future plans of studying sociology in college, Salome said, adding she wants to experience Halloween.“I love kids,” she said. “I want to work in education with young people.”Salome said she hopes to return to the library to keep volunteering and to volunteer across Butler.“I want to continue volunteering here,” she said. “I'll take good things which will be better for my country and help my country ... I want to share with my classmates and friends everything I learned here.”
