The word “spread” means to display or exhibit. “Awesome” is remarkable or outstanding. Combined, the phrase “Spread the Awesome” means to display or exhibit something remarkable or outstanding. As a new club dedicated to community service, advisor Kirt Peterson comments, “There are several clubs that do that, but one of the things that we wanted to do was also demonstrate what other people are doing that’s great. The goal is to serve the community and to help improve different walks of life.”
Peterson is the advisor for Spread the Awesome and also teaches the Understanding the Social World class. “I had the phrase on the board, and [the class] said let’s make it the name. It was an idea that some of my students thought of. It is the connection to the social skills class and how they can generalize to it. Spread the Awesome is the goal of my class: to spread and to demonstrate great things and to be great around people.”
Senior Elizabeth Platte is the president of the club. She comments, “We are different from other community service groups because we don’t raise a lot of money. Instead, we donate our time to help people.”
As such, many members were drawn to the club by the community service opportunities. Sophomore Jason Gomez says, “I really like to help people, but I don’t often get the chance to, so I’m really excited.”
This is the first semester the club has been active. As a way to practice social skills and community service, Peterson says, “[Community service] is one of the ways we can generalize the skills they’ve been working on in class. We can help them do that by giving them a situation that makes sense.”
The club meets once a week on Wednesdays in room 132. Platte says, “During meetings we discuss things that we can do to not only make us feel good about what we’ve done but to leave the people we helped feel good too. In our latest meeting, we discussed trying to help at a senior citizen home to teach them how to play Wii, to listen, to tell stories and to spend time with them since there may not be much interaction with younger people.”
The club plans to go to the Senior Center within the next two weeks. Peterson says, “We’ve talked about the difference between playing and teaching a game. You can’t just take over the console and play for an hour.”
In the future, Peterson says, “We’re thinking of getting involved with some of the Giants Junior baseball stuff. They have a competition about improving baseball fields around here. So we would be able to donate our time and try to get involved with that.”
Additionally, Peterson comments, “In the next few years, hopefully we’ll have consistent events. Part of goal is to help out our own students. So hopefully, we’ll have that expanded group of students who have been doing it for a while and bring in younger kids to help service their community.”
Despite big plans for the future, the club still remains relatively new. Peterson says, “It’s a super fun idea, but right now, we’re looking for people who want to run with it.”
