Make a Difference Day at Duke University

Make a Difference Day with the Duke Office of Student Community Volunteer Programs here at Duke University was a two site setup coordinated mainly by our fearless VISTA* Neil Hoefs. Neil coordinated with local partners Read Seed and Duke Community Garden for a morning of service in Durham.

At the Duke Community Garden, volunteers gleaned leftover produce for eventual distribution at the Durham Food Bank.

My role in the event was to manage the Read Seed Site on Duke's West Campus. We had a great location in the very heart of the campus quad thanks to the help of fellow sponsor Jenni Davidson with the Sophomore Year Experience. Ian Wolf, fellow Literacy Corps member at Duke, also helped out at the site. We worked with Adelaide from Read Seed to prepare for their annual Read-A-Thon in November. Volunteers helped out by drawing storybook characters and creating "yellow bricks" that will decorate the Read-A-Thon..

Ian working on his character: Thing #1

We had around 10-12 volunteers throughout the morning at our site, and a similar amount at the Garden. It was encouraging to see how passers-by wanted to get involved and were interested to learn more about Make a Difference Day in general. We answered a lot of questions and brought attention to the work Adelaide and Read Seed do here in Durham to bring more books to children. Also, Adelaide was very pleased with our work and seemed sincerely thankful for our service.

Working in pairs, we were able to make 3 or 4 characters for the Read-a-Thon and I believe we signed some people up to volunteer on that date. After that we had pizza and soda at the quad. Overall, it was a good day that encouraged our partners and volunteers.

More on Service-Learning

Hey everyone!

So I spent quite a bit of time thinking and wrestling with how best to incorporate service-learning here at my site. As I mentioned in our seminar, I plan to combine the ABE reading class I'll be teaching with this service-learning project. (Side note, I'm so excited to be getting to teach a small group class, the particular group I'll be working with are five women, four of which are mothers--and they all are higher level readers, close to a 6th or 7th grade reading level, which means they are tantalizingly close to qualifying for the GED.) Anyhow, we're going to reading and working with a lot of cool material that centers around women and race, now and in the 1960s.

I am a bit stuck, when it comes to what we can do as a meaningful service project that would integrate the content used, the literacy that the students are in the process of gaining, and benefit our community...I wonder if any of you all have any ideas. I had been thinking about the class creating materials for future classes (or to be supplemental material for our tutors), but I'm not sure. I'd more than welcome any ideas from you all! Also, I would love to hear more about what you all are planning on doing.

Jenn