Annual Day of Service Brings Together Community Organizations And University Families

Over 200 student, faculty, and staff volunteers from the University of Chicago family recently participated in a Day of Service Event. Photo Credit: Photos by Eddie Quinones, Courtesy of the University of Chicago
Over 200 student, faculty, and staff volunteers from the University of Chicago family recently participated in a Day of Service Event. Photo Credit: Photos by Eddie Quinones, Courtesy of the University of Chicago

Annual Day of Service Brings Together Community

Organizations And University Families

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

The University of Chicago recently hosted their Annual Day of Service event both on and off campus amid a winter snow storm. Thankfully, the heavy snow did not deter over 200 volunteers from taking part in community-based projects hosted near the University campus and

meeting their on-site goal of assembling 35,000 rice meal bags for the Rise Against Hunger project.

There were two kinds of service projects that took place, one being the campus-based meal packaging project that was hosted in partnership with Rise Against Hunger, an international hunger relief organization that distributes food and aid to the world’s most vulnerable

populations. The second kind of project that took place during the Day of Service was off-site collaborations with community organizations in neighborhoods surrounding the University of Chicago like Woodlawn, Washington Park, Hyde Park, Bronzeville, and South Shore.

“Our community partners really spent some time talking to volunteers about what their mission is and what their challenges are and ways that people can get involved beyond the Day of Service and then the volunteers did whatever the project was that the group had put together.

You had some that were artistic in terms of creating new murals or repainting things, there were some that were organizational in terms of thinking about how to restructure that space in a food pantry, and we had some projects that were kind of strategic planning where the community group wanted to brainstorm community events that they could do in the future,” said Shaz Rasul executive director of Student Civic Engagement for the Office of Civic Engagement at the University of Chicago.

A wide range of people were invited to participate in the Day of Service including students from the University of Chicago, University of Chicago Lab and Charter School students, and University of Chicago faculty and staff.

“It’s a full University event in that it includes what people would normally think of as the University, the colleges and the graduate schools, but it also includes our Lab School and the University of Chicago Charter School. We have projects that include the youngest students that are in the University of Chicago family at the Lab and Charter school, we have graduates and postdoctoral scholars, and it’s open for staff and faculty to participate in as well,” said Rasul.

This event is held every year in conjunction with the many Martin Luther King Day celebrations that take place at the University of Chicago during the month of January and students and faculty look forward to the opportunity to engage with their neighboring communities, according to Rasul.

“Our students today really have this as a hope or expectation that there will be opportunities to connect to people,” said Rasul. “I think that it’s important for students to have an opportunity to work with Chicagoans and issues that face Chicago and those issues are sometimes small enough to be advanced in a day and sometimes they are much larger but you have to start somewhere.”

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