By Rachel O'Reilly
When I became the coordinator of Building Community: Serving to Learn in 2010, I did not think it would be more than a summer job allowing me to work with nonprofit organizations and coordinating volunteer sites.
However, I quickly realized the job was time consuming, difficult and that I would take the position for a second time this year.
The job of the student coordinator for the project is to contact organizations within 20 minutes of campus and sites previously involved in the project that can accommodate at least 54 students for 2.5 hours on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.
First, sites have to take at least one bus (54 people) of students – most sites cannot accommodate more than 25 people. Second, most organizations do not have staff to supervise volunteers during Labor Day weekend. Lastly, since students only volunteer for a couple hours, the sites need to be closer to campus so maximum time can be spent at the volunteer site.
I tried to incorporate a wider variety of sites during my two years of coordinating the service day, instead of mainly pulling ivy as was previously done. Unfortunately, organizations in the Portland-metro area simply could not accommodate large groups of students.
It was the wish of the administration (and without my input) to have 100 students stay on campus. With such a limited number of sites available due to the above challenges, these 100 students would have had nowhere else to go anyways.
The focus of the service day is on the value of bonding as a new student while doing a service project, regardless of where you are or what the project is. I encourage you to consider coordinating the project next year with the excellent support of the Shepard Freshman Resource Center and take on the challenge of finding a variety of sites or changing the placement of freshmen on campus if it seems unfit.
Building community should be more than a day of complaining about volunteer sites and working close to UP. It is about coming together as a freshman class to improve your new community.
