On Sunday, October 12, I made the huge sacrifice of waking up at 8:30 a.m. Why? My dorm’s Philanthropy Chair convinced me to sign up for Make a Difference Day, one of the many annual volunteering events organized by the Center for Student Involvement.
As I dragged my feet towards the meeting place, I asked myself: Why did this ever seem like a good idea?
My reasons were contradictory: A part of me likes to volunteer just for the sake of it, but ultimately, I decided to do it because of the six Philanthropy points I would earn (and I need them if I want to live in my residential college next year). I wondered if most Northwestern students are like me. Perhaps they’re willing to volunteer, but need strong incentives and encouragement to actually get out there. How much are Northwestern students are actually involved in Community Service?
Weinberg sophomore Vanessa Lee said she thinks Northwestern students participate enough, but that “a good percentage of people are just sporadic about it.”
When asked, “Did you go to Make a Difference Day?” Medill freshman Alexander Fones gave a typical student response. “No idea of what that is,” he said. “Can you tell me about it?”
We are interested in civic engagement, but it’s still not part of the average Northwestern student’s life. But the administration is definitely working on changing that.
“One of the goals is to do some community mapping to prevent duplicate efforts in the different organizations on campus,” said Ravi Randhava, an AmeriCorps volunteer working at the Student Affairs Office. “We also want to assess the services that we are providing to the communities.”
The Center for Student Involvement (CSI) is a great resource for volunteer activists on campus. They make service in Chicago relatively easy and much more accessible by providing students groups use of six community service vans, free of charge. This year a record 130 students participated in CSI’s Make a Difference Day. Though if it’s billed as “a campus-wide event,” certainly more people should have been involved.
Unfortunately, most efforts on campus have been targeting the few people that volunteer regularly anyway and so already consider volunteering a core value. What’s needed now is for those organizational improvements to address encouraging all students to get involved. Even with these outreach efforts, the bulk of students that volunteer “sporadically” need to be given some incentives.
“It’s not about funding programs, what we really want is for civic engagement to become a Northwestern value, something that we all have in common,” said SESP sophomore Meixi Ng.
Ng is involved in the recently founded Northwestern Engagement Coalition, a student group established with the goal of uniting the many groups on campus that already advocate civic engagement into a single, organized effort, to reduce overlap in service service projects.
The Northwestern Engagement Coalition’s most recent effort was writing a letter to the Presidential Search Community, asking that they choose a new President who advocates civic and global engagement through our academic curriculum as well as our extracurricular activities.
Though many people volunteer in some capacity while at Northwestern, only a few find passion in it. “You realize that it’s not so much about ‘giving’, not about feeling good about yourself, but about the joy of interacting with people,” said Meixi.
How many of us feel like Meixi? We do care and, as a result, Northwestern community service groups are strong and active. The obstacle now is to recruit the full campus community to volunteering.