While many students spent their spring break tanning on the beaches of the Bahamas or hitting the slopes of Colorado, a select few chose to spend their time off engaging in community service and experimental learning.
In its 11th year, Alternative Spring Break, sponsored by Mobilization of Volunteer Efforts, sent students to one of three sites; Nashville, Denver and Chattanooga’s Cumberland Trail.
In each location, students became involved in community-based service projects and learned about the problems faced by community members. Cason Pierce, sophomore mathematics and economics major, spent his break assisting immigrants and refugees in Nashville.
“It was really cool to spend my spring break doing service,” Pierce said. “It was a great opportunity, and I wish more people would take advantage of it.”
Pierce and seven other students worked with Catholic Charities Refugee Clinic. They helped immigrants and refugees apply for green cards, taught them about American culture and enrolled their children in school.
The site-leader for the trip, 22-year-old Jimmy Tran, had a special reason for going. A similar charity assisted his family after they fled from Vietnam in 1975.
“It was neat to give back to an organization that helped my family in a similar situation,” Tran said. “I know from my family’s stories how difficult it was.”
Students at the Nashville site also worked with the Campus for Human Development, an organization providing residential and education care to the homeless. The students assisted with the charities education programs, tutored homeless people for the GED and helped with art classes.
Students volunteered and helped to preserve the natural resources of the Cumberland Trial in Chattanooga, Tenn. Through The Cumberland Trail Conference, they learned about environmental issues and helped with trail development.
The Cumberland Trail Conference is a non-profit organization, dedicated to the management, maintenance, building and completion of the Cumberland Trail, a Tennessee State Scenic Trail.
Anna Stelzenmuller, one of the students at the site, woke-up each day at 6:30 a.m., hiked 40 minutes up the mountain, to spend the day carving out the trail.
“It was a lot of work and very tiring, but well worth it,” Stelzenmuller said.
In Denver, students also experienced and learned about homelessness. Working with programs coordinated by the Metro Community Provider Network, students surveyed homeless people about their social and financial needs and also engaged in educational outreach programs in two different schools.
Marty Solomon, a senior pre-med student and site-leader for the Denver trip, wanted to stress that ASB is not only about volunteer service. Instead, it is an introduction to service learning, he said. It gives students a chance to experience and explore a social issue in depth.
“Most people don’t understand that you get more out of it than just manual labor,” Solomon said.
The basic philosophies behind service learning are outlined in ASB’s mission statement: “To promote service within our global communities through alternative break projects which immerse participants in vastly different cultures, heighten social awareness, advocate life-long social change and support reciprocal partnership within the communities we serve.”
The purpose is to give students opportunities to learn from experiences they can’t have in a classroom. It also gives students a chance to work with a group of people that they most likely would have never known otherwise.
While volunteering your time, especially your spring break, is a noble cause, these students say they got as much out of it as they put in.
“The trip really helps me put things in perspective,” Tran said. “It makes all the stress and worrying I did over midterms before the break seem petty.”
