Shoes, Potatoes and Homework Help Raise the Bar for Community Service

The April 13 Potato Drop project was a way for hundreds of students to get involved in local hunger relief. Organizers said it brought action and advocacy together.

Service learning and community service have been mainstays of the Winthrop Experience, but this year’s projects took the university to a new level.

Winthrop earned the S.C. Commission on Higher Education’s service learning award in March for its York County Hunger Outreach Project. The entire freshman class participated in one of three fall projects as part of their freshman experience ACAD class. They could collect cans of food and build a design as part of Canstruction, walk in CROP Walk or participate in feeding projects for seniors and children. When it was all over, the students served more than 700 meals, raised $6,000 and collected 11,000 cans of food.

“We are really developing students who are civically engaged,” said Ellin McDonough, program director for service learning in the Center for Career and Civic Engagement. “Our students are interested in service and work with faculty and staff members who are equally engaged. It makes us different and sets us apart.”

Other efforts by the student body that stand out for their creativity and compassion include:

• About 41,000 pounds of potatoes were unloaded at the Dinkins lawn and bagged for area emergency service agencies as part of Hunger Week 2010. A video captured the excitement generated at the “Potato Drop.”
• The Student Athletic Advisory Council spearheaded the “Samaritan’s Feet” project. More than 1,000 pairs of shoes were collected and $2,000 raised for Haitian children.
• Soccer players on the men and women’s team played each other to raise money for the American Cancer Society. Nearly $20,000 was donated.
• Alternative Spring Break expanded to three sites, giving students the chance to make a difference in environmental issues, rural and urban poverty in Tennessee, New York and Kentucky. Thirty-eight students and five faculty/staff members participated.
• Twenty-four students volunteered at a homework clinic at Emmett Scott Center with an afterschool program designed for at-risk children.

Winthrop joined an elite list, as it was named to the 2009 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, the highest federal recognition a college or university can receive for its commitment to volunteering, service-learning and civic engagement. This was the first time Winthrop earned the distinction designation, and it was one of only three higher education institutions in South Carolina to do so.