Community Action Service

What is CAS?
CAS stands for Creativity, Action, and Service, and is one of the requirements of the IB Diploma Programme. The aim of CAS, according to the IB CAS Guide (2017 graduation) is:

• enjoy and find significance in a range of CAS experiences 
• purposefully reflect upon their experiences 
• identify goals, develop strategies and determine further actions for personal growth 
• explore new possibilities, embrace new challenges and adapt to new roles 
• actively participate in planned, sustained, and collaborative CAS projects 
• understand they are members of local and global communities with responsibilities towards each other and the environment. "

As part of our IB course at UBC, we are required to go through the CAS experience as students would, and log our hours spent in Creativity, Action, and Service over the term. Below are descriptions of the ways that I fulfilled my hours, as well as a link for my logged hours.

Total hours: Service = 29, Creativity = 24.5, Action = 135.3

Service
The Writers’ Exchange is a non-profit organization that provides free after-school and in-school mentoring to inner-city kids in Vancouver. Their goal is to get kids excited about reading and writing, and give them the confidence to know that they are awesome and can achieve anything. A typical day of volunteering involves games and healthy snacks, time for reading and homework, and a special activity aimed to encourage (and sometimes "trick") kids into practicing their literacy skills. I have been working and volunteering with the Writers’ Exchange for over a year, and during the school term I participated as a weekly volunteer mentor with the after-school grades 1-3 group on Wednesdays. I am also a member of the volunteer outreach team, and participated in three different events during the fall term to try and connect with UBC students who are interested in volunteering with children and youth. I created and delivered presentations to student groups through the TREK program, and had a booth at the UBC volunteer fair where I was able to introduce students to our programs and encourage them to become involved with our organization. I also designed a poster board display for the volunteer outreach events using my (fairly limited) photoshop and design abilities.

Some of the highlights of the semester include:
Building blanket forts and reading ghost stories in them with the librarians from the Hastings and Mount Pleasant branches of the VPL,
​Writing halloween-themed rhymes and afterwards, eating candy,
Eating and writing stories about barbeque crickets. YUM!

Action
I have a two-year-old border-collie-mix dog who requires a lot of exercise and attention. I take her out for three walks every day, and we spend at least an hour outside every day. Most days we spend closer to two hours outside, and my step counter averages about 14,000 steps a day because of it. Additionally, because my dog is a rescue, she has a number of behavioural and psychological problems that I work with her on daily on my own, and with a trainer once a month. Dog training, although not recorded in my CAS hours, is a large piece of my daily life with my dog and could also have been included in this section.


​Creativity
Having graduated from a Fine Arts program prior to beginning the B.Ed program, arts and creativity has always been a huge part of my life. Unfortunately, it tends to be one of the things that I have the least amount of time for these days, although I still enjoy sketching and experimenting with new materials when the time and opportunity exists. I chose to take an arts approach to one of my assignments this semester which I have logged as CAS hours. Although we could have just chosen an existing item from our house, I decided that I would take the opportunity to make some art for fun and for school, and I went above the requirements of the course by making three drawings. Images of the drawings can be found in an earlier post about my Autogeography Assignment.