Campus life hosts volunteer week Southeast Serves

After more than a decade without a volunteer week, Campus Life has decided to put together another week to help promote community service and get students at Southeast Missouri State University to roll up their sleeves and learn about the need for volunteers in the Cape Girardeau area.

The special volunteer week is known as Southeast Serves and will run April 2-5. Last year Campus Life collected a record of more than 68,000 volunteer hours done by students doing community service during the academic year. The projects listed for students to do for Southeast Serves include hosting a Big Brother Big Sister event and helping with an MDA walk.

Back in July, the Campus Life leaders decided for the first time to hire a graduate assistant for service because they wanted to spend more time working to get students involved in the community. That graduate assistant, Megan Johnson, is helping out with Southeast Serves.

Michele Irby, director of Campus Life and Event Services, said that she wanted to get students to get the best experience of the week for giving back, not only on to the campus community, but also at Southeast.

"As of right now, 80 students have registered for the Southeast Serves with 500 hours of projects registered for," Johnson said.

Johnson said that she understands that students can have busy schedules, so she is trying to make easy for students participating in Southeast Serves by breaking up project registrations from 90-minute to two-hour time frames. For example, a student could state that they wanted to volunteer at Cape Splash for two hours.

Individual site coordinators will be at every site the student chooses to go to make sure that all hours are completed that the student chooses to register for.

"If you go to the humane society, there will be someone who checks you in," Irby said.

Irby said that a lot students spend their time volunteering at reading programs, local churches and at food pantries.

Irby said that the last volunteer week at Southeast happened more than a decade ago. She said that she would like to try and make this an annual event for students to participate in. This year, Irby said that there will be opportunities on campus for students wanting to volunteer that do not have transportation.

Volunteers will be needed at the Messy Morning event and MOCHIP that will be held at the Show Me Center on April 5. MOCHIP will provide parents information regarding Amber Alerts and volunteers will be needed to help with take pictures of the children and get their fingerprints.

"If you haven't served before, this is your opportunity to try it," Irby said. "You don't have to be part of an organization. You can come out as an individual. We have opportunities on campus for students who do not have transportation. This is really risk free. If you want to go out and do specific things like kids, pets or manual labor like mulching and planting flowers, we have a variety of activates. Come spend a few hours with us."

Students interested in learning more about Southeast Serves projects that Southeast Serves can visit semo.edu/campuslife, which includes a sign-up page for students interesting in joining.

The deadline to register was March 14. However, Irby said that if more people are interested and missed the deadline, she will try and match people with projects that they are interested in helping out with.

Students that volunteer in Southeast Serves will be welcomed to a closing ice cream party at 2 p.m. April 5 at the Skylight Terrace in the University Center.