Many spring break students spend their annual week off partying in the sun. But a group from Emerson College has found a rewarding way to use their break.
By Edward Burns
While most students were getting ready for spring break trips to sunny, party destinations like Cancun or Daytona Beach, Emerson College Senior Audrey Geis was preparing for a much different kind of trip.
Geis is involved in the Alternative Spring Break program at Emerson, which annually sends students around the country to spend time volunteering in different communities.
This year, Geis, a Political Communication major and student coordinator for Emerson's Alternative Spring Break, volunteered at a homeless shelter in Florida. This was not her first experience in the program, which ipreviously has brought her to places like New Orleans to help with the hurricane relief and to Washington D.C. to work in a homeless shelter.
"It's such a powerful experience," Geis said. "You don't know an issue until you see it."
This past spring, more than 65,000 college students took part in an alternative spring break, according to Samantha Gincobozzi of Break Away, a nonprofit organization that helps schools get programs going through training and information.
Gincobozzi said that ever since Hurricane Katrina, trips to aid with disaster relief in particular are becoming more and more popular.
This year, 45 students from Emerson College signed up for the experience of helping out in various communities around the country, but 14 of those volunteers stayed in Boston to work with kids at the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club.
Sarah Aaskov, a senior journalism major at Emerson, led the trip to Roxbury, where the group helped out by working with kids on their homework, spending time with them on arts and crafts projects or playing games, and other various tasks around the club.
"I think it's too bad it can't be for longer," Aaskov said. "But a week is better than nothing. The little things can really help these kids."
Aaskov said that she and her fellow volunteers are in a special position to be able to help the children. She said that as students, they are old enough to have authority over the kids, but are still young enough to connect to them in ways that adults might not be able to.
For example, Aaskov told the story of a game of pool she played with one of the club's boys on the third day of their trip. In the middle of the game the boy stopped, as if thinking of something. He then asked Aaskov, "Are we friends?"
"He needed to be reassured," she said. "It's hard seeing kids need attention."
But according to Chris Devlin, a program coordinator at the Boys and Girls Club, the biggest contribution the volunteers made during their week at the club was the individual attention they were able to give the children.
"No matter who the volunteers are here, the kids just want to have that attention," said Devlin. "The more volunteers we have, the more attention we can give to each kid. They were able to play a board game with just one kid, for example, which we never would have been able to do if it's just the regular staff."
Devlin said that, while only being there for one week, the Emerson volunteers may not have been able to affect any kind of long term change in the kids, but the time they spent with the kids allowed the club's own workers to continue their community building work, like the road race they sponsored Saint Patrick's Day weekend.
For Geis, this kind of community help is what the program is all about. She said that in all her trips she has seen poverty and people struggling, and that regardless of how deep or lasting the effect of her volunteer work was, it left a mark on her.
"The individual gets as much out of it as the community," she said. "I'd never talked to a homeless person before. You're whole mindset becomes so different."
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