The eating clubs collectively announced the formation of the Community Service Interclub Council on Wednesday.
Kate Gardner ’16 of Tower Club and Kevin Larkin ’16 of Colonial Club were appointed co-presidents.
The council is the third organization in which all of the eating clubs designate representatives, beside the Interclub Council and the Graduate Interclub Council. Representatives are to be the community service chairs of each club, and Gardner said the group will meet monthly. Some clubs have more than one community service chair.
Joseph Margolies ’15, president of the Interclub Council, explained that the CSICC grew out of community service dinners used to gather the community service chairs of the different clubs into one place and was aided by having a graduate adviser, Lisa Schmuki ’74, who organized the dinners and helped the clubs formalize their stated goal of engaging in community service.
He added that the idea of the council was to promote community service that was more coordinated between the clubs.
The council’s immediate priority, however, will be continuing to organize TruckFest. The event, in its second year, consists of having food trucks on Prospect Avenue. The proceeds from tickets for the food trucks benefit the Send Hunger Packing Initiative, which helps to provide low-income schoolchildren with meal packs on the weekends.
The even raised over $20,000 for the initiative in its inaugural yearlast year, and Gardner said she is hoping to double the number of food trucks this year and raise $50,000.
“We’re hoping to have 25 trucks this year, which should hopefully help with the lines, as well as being around 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., instead of a little bit later,” she said.
Larkin added they were working to coordinate what types of food trucks would be serving.
Margolies added that when he was president of Quadrangle Club, there was a semi-annual effort to raise money through an auction or other means to purchase Christmas gifts for local low-income families and that the CSICC could eventually help to standardize these types of efforts.
“I think it would be an excellent accomplishment to just keep doing what they're doing in terms of TruckFest, but we have seen with the ICC is that it’s helpful to share ideas, best practices, experiences among all the clubs so we can address problems that face us collectively or is facing a club that another club has already dealt with,” Margolies said. “With the community service officers who used to operate independently of any collaboration among the clubs, having a group not only to organize an event together but also to discuss what they’re doing individually ... will make them more effective.”
Schmuki said the University has been supportive but that the formation of the council around the same time of a perceived civic engagement push by University administration was “coincidental.” The University this week released a video of President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 discussing his experience volunteering as an undergraduate.
“I suggested an idea of all of the community service chairs getting together on a monthly basis just to share ideas, and we did that for a year. And the club managers were great. It was sort of like a food tour,” Schmuki said, adding that the idea for TruckFest came out of the meetings. “It just caught fire really.”
Larkin said he agreed that the dinners have been valuable to the community service chairs.
“By formalizing this as an official relationship, we’d be ensuring it for the future and have a lot of exciting possibilities,” Larkin said.
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