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Most of the students who volunteer through SEEDS prefer to focus their efforts on a single cause or project over time, rather than jump from one volunteer opportunity to the next. That’s why Cohen is trying to deepen relationships with nine organizations representing different topic areas, such as homelessness, environmental education,the elderly, and at-risk youth. He wants students to develop more meaningful connections to a topic. “We want less breadth and more depth,” Cohen says. Student interns will manage these relationships.
Events like Into the Streets, a national day of service, and MLK Day will continue to offer one-time service opportunities to foster a sense of community and encourage volunteerism. On a rainy Saturday in April, Cohen drove a vanload of volunteers to Portland’s biggest Earth Day celebration to help kids make costumes, paint murals, and learn about the city’s natural areas.
Staying dry under a tent, several Reed students helped Sue Thomas ’73, environmental education specialist for the Portland Parks Bureau, advertise wildlife watching in Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Frogs are the refuge’s primary inhabitants, and as part of the frog-related activities and displays, Tina Le ’08 made origami frogs to attract youngsters passing by.
Le,
a soft-spoken student from Santa Clara, California, says she likes working with people in structured
environments. She tutors a Tubman middle-schooler once a week and says she came to Earth Day
because “I’m helping someone out.”
Thomas hopes to elicit further help from Reed students. She is working with SEEDS intern Loren Albert ’07 to put Reed students in charge of a neglected riverside area of the refuge to remove non-native invasive plants and restore an old walking trail. “It’s not just a single project, it’s something ongoing where students could decide what to do,” says Thomas, adding “another advantage to getting involved in such a substantive project is that it gives students considering environmental jobs a better sense of the work involved.”
Albert says longer-term, multifaceted projects are also more enticing to Reed students. “It’s fulfilling to see projects to completion,” she says.
Christine Lewis ’07 has found fulfilling volunteer work as one of two dozen mentors at Tubman Middle School—a second facet of the Reed-Tubman Partnership. “It’s a concrete way to break out of the Reed bubble,” Lewis says.