While most students will enjoy a day of relaxation on Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a few hundred will “make it a day on” by volunteering in community projects across Northwest Ohio.
For the 10th year in a row, the University is hosting the MLK Jr. Day of Service. At least 750 students will donate their time Monday, most of them signed up to volunteer at one of 35 project sites in the area. A total of at least 2,500 hours is expected to be served by students.
Student leaders in the Center for Community and Civic Engagement primarily organize the Day of Service, which includes volunteers sign-ins, transportation and a closing ceremony.
Angel Alls-Hall is a senior who works at the CCCE as one of several civic action leaders.
“It’s all about the engagement and participation from BGSU,” Alls-Hall said. “I feel like we have a really good pool of students who are willing to volunteer and do these things.”
Alls-Hall spoke to the success of the program in its 10 years. All those years ago, there were only about 30 participants, compared to this and previous years’ hundreds.
“It’s part of a national movement,” CCCE associate director Paul Valdez said. “Part of the reason it was named a holiday is so that people could contribute to their communities on that day.”
2008 marked the first MLK Jr. Day of Service, which was grant-funded, allowing for the project materials to be paid for through the Office of Service Learning, which became the CCCE in 2016. As the day of service has grown, funding has shifted to community partners.
The projects range from small to big and near to far. One local project is with La Conexion de Wood County.
La Conexion de Wood County is a “community-based organization that works with Latino as well as recent-immigrant families,” Jacqui Campbell, a civic action leader, said. She worked with La Conexion in her freshman year, where she learned about the then Office of Service Learning.
Volunteers will be building 15 “Little Free Libraries” bookcases. The project is partnered with Home Depot, Habitat for Humanity and the Rotary Club. About 50 students will help build and prime the bookcases under supervision of skilled workers from the partner groups. The lumber and other material were paid for with a grant from Serve Ohio.
“The Bowling Green community center wants one, some of the schools are interested, so I don’t think we’re going to have any problem getting rid of them,” Valdez said about the bookshelves.
The farthest reaching project is a partnership with the Hancock park department. The travel time is about 45 minutes, and students will do general park clean-up and use tools to resurface picnic tables, Campbell said.
Some other projects are much smaller in scale, as few as five students may be assigned to projects such as general cleaning with a partner.
One of the CCCE’s strengths is its community relations. This makes finding and connecting with partnerships relatively simple.
“Since it’s our 10th year, we have lists of people who have participated in the past,” a lot of it is just getting the info out and how to sign up for the day, Valdez said. “Our recruitment is not nearly as difficult as it was in the earlier years.”
Unlike previous years, students who volunteer will receive a dinner after they serve. This is along with bagged lunches prepared by the classified staff and administrative staff council, who prepare hundreds of lunches.
Although a warmer spring day could allow for better service projects, holding the day of service on MLK Jr. Day is important to many members of the CCCE.
“MLK Day encompasses the purpose and the main goal of why we serve,” Alls-Hall said. “The legacy that MLK left behind and his dream and vision for having a community … working together.”
Beyond the Day of Service, the CCCE is at work year-round.
In the fall, the center co-hosted the City Council Candidate Forum. The center also houses BG Votes, a non-partisan effort to engage student voters.
Year-round, they focus on community-based learning courses by tracking them to ensure students have valuable experiences. They’re also responsible for the fall and spring alternative breaks, which share a similar mentality to the Day of Service.
CCCE also utilizes Falcon Funded, a crowd-sourcing method through the University. Using this method, the CCCE has reached out to the 4,900 alumni who have participated in the Day of Service over the past ten years.
