Senior Project - Louisa L

It’s insane that we are nearing the end of Senior Project! I am sad to be leaving Spectrum but know without a doubt that I’ll be back. Spectrum’s Drop-In Center is a safe and welcoming place for young people (14-24) “ to eat a meal, use a computer or phone, do laundry, get clothing, take a shower, and get other basic needs met”. They have the resources to provide supportive housing, mental health/ substance abuse counseling, and mentoring. They also have the resources to educate the community in a variety of ways. Last Tuesday, we met with a woman named Jess from the Howard Center. The Howard Center provides support and services to address mental health, substance use, and developmental needs. They provide Narcan to the Burlington community, which can otherwise be very expensive. We were trained to administer Narcan ( which reverses an overdose), and what overdose signs to look out for. I’m beyond grateful that Spectrum provided us with this opportunity. I live in a place where opioid ...

 May 20, 2022 Lucy and I have been super conscious of our food waste during this project. We have found it is more sustainable to do our shopping day by day. This morning, we headed to Shaws to pick up creamy tomato pasta and garlic bread ingredients. We got everything we needed and proceeded to clean the kitchen when we got home. We made the creamy tomato pasta with onions, tomato, basil, parm, and cream. Our garlic bread had the perfect butter/ garlic ratio and was delicious. When everything was finished, Lucy and I headed to Spectrum to hand out our meal and chat with our friends. Today was a quiet day because it was so lovely out; when the weather is nicer people tend to stay outside. I have a pretty significant ACL injury, and today one of our new friends walked me through the process of surgery. I walked away from the conversation with a weight lifted from my chest. Every day I am learning so much from our mentors, but more from the youth that use the drop-in center. The cent...

May 19, 2022 Today there was a massive rainstorm in Burlington today. This morning when we woke up, Lucy and I realized that we needed to go shopping for missing ingredients. We decided last minute to make crazy brownies with cookies, brownies, and Oreos. We had tempeh from last week, which is a soybean meat alternative. It was my first time ever cooking with it, and at first, the consistency looked quite unappealing. We made a vegan chili mac and cheese and the tempeh tasted amazing when it was mixed in! The key to tempeh is a lot of spices and sauce! Lucy made a black bean and chickpea stew, and we had leftover arugula for a separate salad. When we got to Spectrum, we played a big game with everyone where we put tape with a word on our foreheads and had to guess what the word was. We had a great time, every second of the game was hilarious! There was a police standoff outside of the restaurant next to Spectrum, which was definitely a spectacle during dinner. Lucy and I both have so m...

 Wednesday, May 18 This morning we woke up and started our food prep, which consisted of lots of veggie cutting - broccoli, mushrooms, carrots, celery, and bell peppers! Our meal today was veggie stirfry, which we sort of winged. We made this meal last week, but today we added chicken to mix it up. It tasted really good, and the youth enjoyed it a lot. Our brownies were a huge hit, and when we were at Spectrum we ended up serving sundaes with all the toppings!! The brownie crumbles went perfectly with ice cream. Brigit is our supervisor at Spectrum, but yesterday she was not there. We took over yesterday, which was a big deal. Everything went really well and we had some really wonderful conversations with the youth <3.  The opioid epidemic is a serious national crisis that affects public health/ economic health. Opioid overdoses are fatal, and sadly very common. Narcan can quickly reverse an overdose if administered correctly. We met with Jess from Safe Recovery to be ...

This morning we made our first non-vegan meal! We cooked chicken enchiladas with a homemade sauce, which we served with an arugula salad, bean/ corn salad, and brownies. Lucy and I do not usually cook much meat, but I think our chicken came out really delicious! It was a hit at Spectrum, and everyone was a big fan of having chicken! We will stick to cooking meat because it turns out that everyone there eats it.                                                                                            Today was a pretty intense day when we were at Spectrum. It led us to have a critical conversation about what kind of services they offer to youth. Because Spectrum is completely donation-based, they have lee-way to run their organization how they want. This means ...

We did not cook again today due to the massive amounts of food donations at Spectrum. Tomorrow we are finally incorporating meat into our meals, starting off with chicken enchiladas. We headed to Spectrum to pick up our serving dishes and learned how to the sanitation dishwasher, which was cool. We headed to Shaws to get the needed ingredients for enchiladas. We planned ahead and cooked brownies from scratch, and made a black bean salad for tomorrow. We are excited to incorporate meat into our meals and think that the crew at Spectrum will be psyched too. Tomorrow is a big day, we will probably end up getting the rest of the shopping done for the rest of the week. We have put together a completely different menu for this week, and are excited to see our new friends tomorrow!!  Brownies for tomorrow <3 Hours : 4.5