Calvin students serving in record number of places this spring break

On Friday, March 16, nearly 150 students, faculty and staff will depart from Calvin and travel to a record 13 different locations nationwide for service-learning spring break trips.
See full story: http://www.calvin.edu/news/archive/spring-break-trips-build-community
Students will be serving in Kermit, West Virginia; Knoxville, Tennessee; Biloxi and Mendenhall, Mississippi; Houma and Grand Isle, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama; Three Rivers, Michigan; the Great Smoky Mountains; Americus, Georgia, St. Louis, Missouri; Boston, Massachusetts and Baltimore, Maryland.
"We don't call them mission trips," said Calvin associate director of the service-learning center Noah Kruis. "We're not bringing the good news where we're going. We're going to bear witness to people who are bringing the good news in the community they live in year round."
The students will be serving in a center for at-risk young women, transforming an abandoned school into a community center, working with mentally disabled adults, exploring urban ministry, intentional community and organic farming, doing disaster relief, trail maintenance and construction, promoting a community arts center, remodeling a computer lab and learning about the impact of mountaintop removal.
Over the years, the service-learning spring-break trips-which have been going on for more than three decades-have returned to many of the same sites over and over again. (Only the Baltimore and Mendenhall trips are new this year.) These "return engagements" build the relationships with Calvin's partner agencies all over the U.S., said Kruis.
Kruis is also inspired by the tradition of student leadership that drives the trips. Although every group is accompanied by a faculty or staff mentor, the entire enterprise is planned, executed and driven by a student leader or leaders. Many people have repeated as mentors, some to the same location year after year. And many students-and even alumni-are spring break repeaters.
"This year, 13 of 14 leaders are returning to a place they've been before," said Kruis. "It's building that legacy, that relationship."
NOTE: Most trips will take off from the Covenant Fine Arts Center parking lot at 5 p.m. on Friday, March 16 (following a pizza party in the Commons Lecture Hall).
For more info, contact the service-learning center at 616-526-6455.
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Received on Thu Mar 15 11:18:49 2012