Inter-Action sends volunteers to Trenton

Each morning, participants were bussed from Baker Rink to Trenton. From Trenton, participants dispersed to various service projects in the area according to their interests in fields ranging from education and law to hunger and homelessness.

“Regarding the service component, the participants did so much that it would be hard to list it all,” Pace Center director Kiki Jamieson said in an e-mail. “They did cleanup work, organized offices, painted, tutored, sorted used clothing and worked on home construction.”

While the program sought to increase the overall level of civic engagement, it was also a unique opportunity for athletes and other students, whose busy schedules often make it difficult to engage in regular service projects.

“The program was meant to provide a high-impact experience for a large number of students and to engage students whose schedules do not allow regular civic participation during the semester, and bring them together with students who are actively engaged,” Runqiu Cai ‘11, one of the project’s organizers, said in an e-mail.

“We really made an effort in recruiting to reach out to as many people as possible, especially groups who are underrepresented in service,” Reilly Kiernan ’10, one of the Inter-Action organizers, said. She cited varsity athletes and international students as two of the groups that the program focused on recruiting. Kiernan is also a former associate editor for news for The Daily Princetonian.

Inter-Action also offered participants the chance to experience a wide variety of civic engagement opportunities. Because she usually works on the policy side of education, Alexis Morin ’12 said she appreciated the chance to observe first hand the effects of the minority achievement gap. Morin spent her mornings working with toddlers and children and her afternoons working with middle school students.

“It was a great opportunity, especially for those who aren’t able to volunteer on a weekly basis,” she said. Morin added that a downside of the program was that the 12-hour schedule was “pretty intensive.”

Cindi Yim ’12, who volunteered with Anchor House, an agency that supports runaway and at-risk youth, called the experience “eye-opening.”

“While washing dishes or windows isn’t what you normally think of doing over intersession, it definitely needed to be done, and it felt good to help them out,” she said in an e-mail.

After such hands-on experiences, students attended speaker sessions featuring prominent civic engagement leaders on state and national levels.

Speakers included Omo Moses, who founded The Young People’s Project to teach math skills to low-income students, and Harry Pozycki, chair of the Citizen’s Campaign, which trains new civic leaders for New Jersey. Following the speakers, students participated in workshops geared towards providing them with the skills needed to “become effective leaders for social change,” Jamieson said.

Though she called Inter-Action “extremely successful,” Jamieson also said the Center “will have to consider its future in the context of our overall planning” to decide whether the program would be offered in future years.