By Randiah Green News Editor
Some students volunteered their time feeding the homeless and helping disabled senior citizens as an alternative to playing video games or going to the beach during spring break.
The University of Toledo Campus Ministry along with the Toledo YMCA and Lutheran Campus Ministry sponsored five “alternative spring break” trips this year to Philadelphia, Florida, Mississippi, Jamaica and Louisiana.
“Most of the trips are involved in service projects,” said Toledo Campus Ministry Administrative Assistant Linda Koder. “The students on the Mississippi and Louisiana trips are working on home construction and cleanup work in that area and the group that went to Florida are working doing environmental restoration.”
Students who participated in the trip to Jamaica went to volunteer their services at orphanages and the group of students who went to Philadelphia volunteered at homeless shelters, according to Koder.
“The alternative spring break is a chance for the students to provide service to others and build friendships with others on the trip and to personally challenge themselves,” Koder said. “It’s not like going on a vacation [and] staying in a hotel. You are expected to, perhaps, put up with conditions that aren’t ideal. You learn that you can do without certain things.”
Koder said, though providing community service is an important part of participating in alternative spring break, it is also an opportunity for students to build their self esteem and develop lifelong friendships.
“You are asked to do certain things you wouldn’t do otherwise but that you can do, so it builds up your self esteem,” she said. “A lot of students go for the lifetime friendships that are created in the people they meet in that location and that go with them.”
Students also participated in an alternative spring break with Campus Crusade for Christ.
Joel Pollitz, a junior majoring in social work who participated in an alternative spring break trip to Chicago, said he spent time with children at an orphanage and gave food to the homeless.
“There were about 12 students from UT who went,” he said. “Half of us teamed up with the Salvation Army down there and we loaded up a couple of vans with food and dropped them off at certain locations for people who were homeless or just wanted to come and get food.”
Jeff Gohrband, a junior majoring in criminal justice who went on the trip to Chicago as well, said the group also helped with spring cleaning for disabled senior citizens at a nursing home.
“We spent about a day there helping them clean and just do things that an older person just really wouldn’t be able to do on their own,” he said. “We had a lot of prayer and sharing and just giving our time. It was a really good trip.”
Alternative spring break opportunities are offered to college students all over the country through the United Way.
Mike Brooks, manager of Student United Way for United Way Worldwide, said there is a huge “alternative spring break movement.”
“There’s a lot of alternative break work going on out there and it’s a great thing a lot of universities are doing it in their own way,” he said. “Young people really want to give back. We want to make the world a better place.”
Brooks said the United Way spring break service programs focus on education, income, health issues and recovery work.
“We have students with accounting backgrounds or maybe math and economics backgrounds working with middle schools and doing classroom instruction and teaching those types of things to junior high students,” he said. “In some of the long-term recovery work from the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, students are working on continuing to build and renovate homes.”
The United Way has several community service trips, including one that sends 54 students from around 30 colleges and universities to do community service in Atlanta, Brooks said.
Brooks said the United Way has a strong commitment to Gulf Coast recovery, which began after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, and the group continues to send students there to build and renovate homes during spring break.
Alternative spring break opportunities through the United Way are focused in the United States, but Brooks said they continue to look for global opportunities for the future.
“We’ve been paying a lot of attention to Haiti and Chile as well and I think in the future we’ll look at opportunities to go there because for that sort of thing you need really skilled volunteers: doctors, nurses and that sort of thing,” he said.
Koder said the alternative spring break trips cost around $300 for students except for the trip to Jamaica, which costs $700.
“That covers the travel expenses and their housing and some meals are provided, but not all,” she said. “We try to keep it at a fee the students would easily be able to pay.”
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