University to hold second Southeast Serves Week

Southeast Missouri State University will host its second annual Southeast Serves Week from April 8-11 to give students the opportunity to do service projects throughout the Cape Girardeau community.

"We try to recruit as many members as possible but sometimes they're just not interested in doing a lot of community service like we do, so having this week available for Southeast students to just log in, see what's available, click the projects that they want to do -- there's a variety of things on there that they can help with," Catalina Mahr, Southeast student and member of the service fraternity Gamma Sigma Sigma, said.

Michele Irby, the director of Campus Life and Event Services, said the idea for Southeast Serves came about last year after a need was discovered on campus for a centralized place for service.

She said the idea was to come up with a compressed timeline at some point in the year to allow students to do a large amount of service projects in a short amount of time. The week is designed to be an opportunity for Southeast students, faculty and staff to give back and to make connections throughout the Cape Girardeau community.

"We needed to find a way as the university to coordinate that effort," Irby said. "So last year for the first time, they gave me some graduate assistant dollars and asked if I could have someone who would start trying to make those partnerships or connections. ... We tried last year to develop sort of a student advisory committee, and they helped us with some of our projects and sort of gave us some insight because they were students who were involved with service groups and liked to do service, and they've had that success, I think, again with some students."

Irby said the university decided to continue with the program this year since it was a successful experience for students and all the service-based agencies last year.

"Overall it was really successful, the community liked it, we thought it was beneficial to the agencies and we thought it was also kind of a good marketing tool to our students to say, 'Look at all these opportunities available in the Cape/Jackson community. We want to make sure you know what's out there so that if you want to continue to do this that you can,'" Irby said.

Mahr said service projects will be provided by a number of institutions in the community like the Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center, Chateau Girardeau and the Humane Society of Southeast Missouri.

There will also be an opportunity to work with the Salvation Army's Empty Bowls Project to help create and design ceramic bowls for homeless people in the area.

"This is kind of the preview for students to see what's available and what needs help so that they can go out on their own, create connections and volunteer by themselves that way," Mahr said.

Irby said an addition to this year's Southeast Serves Week is the ability for more student groups to plan their own service projects outside of the given choices on the application.

"I hope that it shows the community that our students care, that they want to get out, and a lot of those students are looking to build long-term partnerships, so that's been a side benefit is that a lot of our students that take advantage of Southeast Serves then will continue to work with those agencies," Irby said.

Last year around 300 students volunteered for about 900 hours of service work for about 25 different agencies in the area during Southeast Serves Week. Irby said the goal for this year is to grow the amount of participants and total service hours completed.

Groups that want to volunteer and take on their own service project for Southeast Serves Week should contact Shaver in the Office of Campus Life and Event Services at (573) 651-2280 or by emailing seserves@semo.edu.

Students who wish to volunteer individually can register at semo.wufoo.com/forms/southeast-serves-week-2015, or go to semo.edu/serve to sign up for other service projects throughout the semester. The deadline to volunteer for Southeast Serves Week is March 31.