When getting involved in a volunteer
project, I think there are many components that contribute to whether it was
truly civic engagement or not. I would like to focus on the learning
experiences that come with new volunteer experiences and activities. At the end
of this summer, I came back to school a week early, along with nine other
volunteers, to be a service mentor in a new program called the Welcome Week
Service Project. It was a three day project that brought in a group of incoming
freshman a week early so that they could jump into volunteering right from the
beginning of their college career. There were multiple different service sites,
and the mentors and students were broken up and assigned to one of the four. If
given the choice, I would have chosen to work with the group that was assigned
to the Discovery Center. I sincerely enjoy working with kids, and I find myself
pretty good at it. However, I was assigned to the group that was help out at BU
Acres, a small new farm on the Binghamton University campus.
Although this was not my first
choice in service projects, I still believe that this was an important
community project, not only because of the work we accomplished at the farm,
but what we learned while doing it. On our first day at the site, before we
began any work, the director of the BU acres farm, Sean Cummings, gave us an
overview of the goals and hopes for greater sustainability at BU Acres. He
explained to us how they are using compost and cardboard garbage from our
campus to create an edible forest garden in the space they have available. He
also gave us some information on the harvesting they do there and informed us
that most of the food they grow is brought back to the CIW dining hall to be
served. I found it very interesting to see how the materials used on our campus
come full circle and are used to produce more food. Our second day of the
project was when I started to see how important it is know the context of the
service work you’re doing to really be civically engaged. Sean Cummings took
the time to explain to us the current status of hunger in Binghamton and Broome
County. He explained to us that most of this region is considered a food
desert, meaning that there is a lack of affordable, quality groceries within a
certain distance. This is something that especially affects those who do not
have a car and have to rely on public transportation. Going into my sophomore
year, I was still unaware of the severity of hunger in the city that I spent
most of my last year in.
Working at BU Acres was certainly
not my first, or even second, choice when it came to the welcome week service
project. When I was presented with the opportunity, I was more interested in
the “mentor” aspect of the position. I was looking forward to meeting some
incoming freshmen and encouraging them to “get involved” right off the bat.
Honestly, most of the freshman in my group weren’t too happy about the location
they were assigned to either. However, I think we were the group that got the
most out of this experience (even though there was another group that got to go
to the Ross Park Zoo and play with penguins). The other mentors and I really
tried to encourage the freshmen in our group to realize why the work they were
doing was so important to their new community. After two days, we left our
service site with a deeper understanding of the hunger problem in Binghamton,
the organizations that are working to end that problem, and how we can help
them. I think our group reached the point of civic engagement because we were
informed about the cause we were helping and we left our service site with an
understanding that more than an occasional visit to a soup kitchen is necessary
to improve hunger in Binghamton.
If anyone is
interested in more information about BU Acres I attached a link to a Pipe Dream
article that explains more about their project and their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Binghamton-University-Acres-Farm/107382186122882
Glad to know you're in support of Acres! It's a really great thing to have on campus to promote sustainability and I think it's great that it's generally open to all students. I think it was a great accomplishment to have gotten the farm established and to have the opportunity to have food sourced from so close to lower our ecological footprint, in the sense that it travels less far and just knowing that the farming practices ARE more sustainable. Learning about where food comes from, becoming more intimate with the means of production, is just such an incredible thing in and of itself as well. Sean also does an awesome job of explaining the context of the farm itself. It's refreshing to know that it can really open peoples' eyes.
ReplyDeleteEmily-
ReplyDeleteYour experience at BU Acres sounds really eye opening and I find it particularly interesting after completing the issue area project on poverty in Binghamton. The Welcome Week Service Project is a fantastic initiative by the university to allow freshmen to dive right into the community. It is a catalyst for them to make connections with each other and the place they will call home for the next few years. I hope that at least one of the freshmen you mentored had the same mindset as you – even if the project is not something you would choose for yourself, it gave you a new perspective on the struggles of Binghamton and what is being done to help. I think this is a great example of what civic engagement should be. On top of volunteering, students learned about the issue at hand and made a connection with an active organization working to ameliorate it.