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I chose to volunteer at the Engineering Department at the Village of Hoffman Estates as I felt it best combined my two UNICEF goals, 6: Clean Water & Sanitation, and 9: Industry, Innovation, & Infrastructure. Over the past two years, I co-founded Run For Water, which focuses on creating water wells to provide clean, sanitary water to underprivileged communities. While this did provide relief to over 2300+ people, I became interested in how this solution could be taken to a much larger, governmental scale. As part of the Engineering Department, I'd be able to learn about the construction and maintenance of resources and infrastructure, while learning the decision-making processes behind each idea and development.

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To be quite honest, I had no idea what to expect with the CEP Project. Other than spending time helping around and listening to people talk, I didn't think much about what my volunteering hours would be spent on.

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I joined the Climate Change Lobby, as it is a way to work towards environmentally friendly legislation and to be able to have some sort of communication with the local government.

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I gave a presentation to my community addressing the issues of the water crisis, and how awareness and taking action would take leaps towards finding a solution.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFnybltM2o/RC7NDi9xs1o9VInR3-T2Hg/edit?utm_content=DAFnybltM2o&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

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The first day, Mr. Wenderski and I went over the general gist of what it is the Engineering Department does. The 5-year plan highlights what the Village of Hoffman Estates has accomplished, and what they intend to carry out in the next 5 years.

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Over the next few sessions, I met with various departments to understand their purposes within the town government, and how each department works with each other to serve the residents best.

First I met with the building permit department, who explained to me the time frames the village follows, as well as the criteria potential building developments need to fit to be carried out.

I then met with the planning department and went over the slideshow from their most recent meeting with the engineering and finance departments. This established the key differences between the planning and engineering departments, as the planning stages take proposals from the people and the engineering department and go through five stages of checking and proofreading before even bringing the proposal to the Village Board. However, the planning department works in tandem with the engineering department to perfect the proposal.

Finally, I met with the economic development department, which I believed to be my favorite meeting. We went through Hoffman Estates' economic development plan and went industry by industry, sector by sector, area by area. What I found to be most interesting was how much foreign business was actually in Hoffman Estates. Overall, the department prioritizes economic growth in all sectors, and also listen to what the residents request. The department then creates proposals for potential economic opportunities, and presents the immense economic gain and why the residents would approve of the development.

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On the Village of Hoffman Estates website, I went through the various projects that have been planned and/or carried out. I found the most interesting one to be their agreement to build massive data centers for Microsoft, as a project of such a grand nature meant the involvement of all the departments.

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The zoning districts separate where certain economic developments will occur.

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After meeting with all the departments, I sat down with Mr. Wenderski to learn more about the maintenance of infrastructure, specifically with regards to the allocation of water throughout the town. Unfortunately, I'm unable to show pictures of the databases, but he highlighted how each individual sewer, pipe, drain, etc. is logged as its own piece, and how they were in the process of taking all these paper records and making them electronic and appear on a map software. To help, I went through old records and data scraped information about pieces street-by-street and logged it into the database.

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CEP Timecard

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CEP Service Contract