Fall Community Service Brings Opportunities Galore

On and off campus, and even all the way in Hartford, Hopkins students have been serving the community this past fall. Maroon Key, Hopkins’ largest student-run community service board, ran their annual Clothing Drive from September 30th to October 30th, partnering with St. Luke’s Episcopal Church to replenish their clothing closet. Outside of campus, Hopkins has extended its outreach in the Greater New Haven area and beyond. This fall has seen a new wave of off-campus service opportunities for students, namely in the form of off-campus routine trips throughout Term 1 during school hours. Even bigger ventures have also been integrated into the Hopkins community service movement, such as overnight trips all the way to Hartford, where students offered hands-on service to nearby locations of organizations such as CT Foodshare and Levo International.

These service opportunities are meant to remind students of their responsibilities to communities on a larger scale than just the Hopkins campus. According to Hopkins Director of Community Service Alissa Davis, “doing actual hands-on volunteering [like this] is something we build into all our trips in order to learn from non-profit leaders and experts in the fields, so that we reflect, think, and gain a better understanding about it. Students can [then] get to really know the Greater New Haven area, understand who our community is responsible to and that we exist within a bigger ecosystem.” Davis hoped that this understanding can foster relationships with these non-profit organizations, emphasizing that “though we can help others, [we can] also learn from others. We don’t want service to be a one-way street, we want more of a chance for reciprocal, long-term relationships to grow.”

During the first weekend of Thanksgiving break, students embarked on the Fall Service Retreat – one of the major trips of this fall. Davis said, “We started off by heading down to CT FoodShare to sort cherry tomatoes, where we ended up sorting around 50,000 pounds of them,” said Jamie Ganter ’27, a member of the trip. “The day after, we went to a local church and handed out cans of assorted non-perishable food to the neighboring community. We also built hydroponic farms for non-profit organization Levo International.”  

Another Maroon Key service opportunity was their clothing drive. It aimed to “benefit clothing insecure individuals in the Greater New Haven community,” said Liliana Dumas ’26, project manager of the clothing drive and Maroon Key treasurer. Dumas contrasted this with toxic charity, where one-way giving leads to an excessive waste of clothing in foreign countries: “By donating to a local organization, we make certain that clothes actually help the local clothing insecure population rather than polluting international beaches. We [also] want to ensure that the Hopkins community actually builds relationships with the organizations we help rather than just donating.” 

These relationships allowed for the introduction of service learning intensives during school hours, transportation provided by Hopkins. “We’re running things like Sunrise Cafe, where students can serve breakfast during A block, fridge haven, where kids are cleaning up a community refrigerator. Davis added that Maroon Key is also “doing a sandwich-making brigade during H block, and preparing food for another soup kitchen.” She conveyed her concerns over the lack of time that students have in their calendar to participate in community service: “I think sometimes it feels like there’s some barriers in our current schedule and in the calendar that make it really hard to make that service as central to our own community as we really want it to be.” The service trip was only Ganter’s second involvement with community service – prior to it, his schedule hadn’t allowed for much otherwise. His appreciation for service thus heightened dramatically following the trip, especially with the firsthand experience: “Tangibly helping someone, right then and there, really made me feel like I was making a difference… it got me thinking that this is something I should continue doing,” he said.

Davis hoped that participation in service can be experienced by more students. Community service participation ties Hopkins students with the larger community: “There’s a temptation to look at [community service] by, say, number of hours,” Davis explained. “Certainly that’s fair, but that doesn’t capture everything about what service is…  the growth, understanding and empathy [that students gain] is so much bigger.”