Princeton Americorps chapter brings service to community

This Saturday is designated by the University as community service day, but some Princetonians have already completed many community service projects around the area this year. Sarah Jennings '03, a member of the new Americorps chapter of Princeton, recently discussed her group's activities with 'Prince' Executive Editor Rob Laset.

'Prince': When was the group founded and who are the founding members?

Jennings: This is the first year that Princeton has had an Americorps program. The program is attached to the Bonner Foundation, which is an organization that allows students to do volunteer/study rather than work/study at schools across the country. Wilson College accepted the proposal for the program, though now there are two of us from Forbes involved as well.

P: Why was the group founded?

J: The group was founded in order to give students an opportunity to make a serious commitment to service by addressing needs within the community of Princeton. We're hoping that the program will expand and eventually form lasting bonds with different community service sites around Princeton. Right now, we have members working at the Clay Street Learning Center, the Crisis Ministry, the Early Child Care Center and at the ESL program at the YWCA.

P: What are the membership obligations?

J: All of us are responsible for completing 450 hours of service during the course of the year. If we complete all of them, we'll receive educational awards that will go towards tuition. Most of us will probably stick around in the summer to finish up. Almost all of those hours are spent at our individual service sites, but there have been a couple state-wide training sessions throughout the year that we've had to attend.

P: How many members do you have?

J: There are six of us on campus, four from Wilson and two from Forbes. In New Jersey, there are other groups at Middlesex Community College, Mercer Community College, Rider University, Cook College of Rutgers and a few other schools — so there are a lot of us.

P: What are some projects you've done as a group in the past few months?

J: In January, some of us participated in a day-long service project on Martin Luther King Day. Most of the service sites for that day were in Trenton, doing things like working at the soup kitchen, cleaning out warehouses or working for Habitat.

Also, the first weekend of spring break we all went up to Boston for a conference for the Campus Outreach Opportunity League, which offered a lot of workshops on activism, politics and organizing volunteer programs on campuses. There were about 1,500 students there from all different types of service organizations across the country, including a lot of students from the SVC.

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P: Why do you personally like participating in the group?

J: I've really enjoyed this program because it's forced me to be more committed to community service than I've been before. Because we spend so much time at our sites, I think a lot of us have been able to form relationships with the people we work with. I've been working with the ESL program in town, doing conversational tutoring sessions and helping to teach English classes.

I've been meeting with several students almost every week since September, and we have absolute freedom with how we use our time. One woman that I'm going to begin working with this month wants to meet every week to begin to write her life history. Another Serbian man is a sculptor and brought in some of his work to talk about.

Another reason that this program has been particularly meaningful to me is because I'm from town. It's given me the opportunity to look back on the place where I grew up with a completely new perspective, which is something that I think very few people get the chance to do.