Students participate in service projects
The Student Alumni Association of USU will be doing a service project to give back to the community on Saturday.
Anyone who wants to participate with the service project can go to the David B. Haight Alumni Center located west of the Widstoe building and sign up from 9 to 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. People will start working on the different projects at 10 a.m. and stop around 1 p.m.
People will need to provide their own transportation.
There will be six different service projects for volunteers to work on, Service Vice President Sarah Smith said. Most projects will be landscape jobs, Smith said.
“We’ve got a highway cleanup project,” Smith said. “We’ve got some street cleaning projects and then there’s some service out at the American West Heritage Center that we’ll be doing.”
People will also get to work on a hiking trail and help with two employment centers, Smith said.
Smith said she expects there to be about 150 people helping with the projects. Twenty different clubs at USU have already committed to have at least two people there, and some have committed as many as 20.
A party will be held at the American West Heritage Center at 7 p.m. Saturday. Everyone who participated in the service will be admitted into the party for free, and those who didn’t participate will be charged $2, Smith said.
Smith said the Aggie Service Day will be the first service project of its kind at USU. Other universities, including Texas A&M and Illinois State University, already do service projects, she said.
“This is a new thing,” Smith said. “This is something that we’ve never done before. It’s something that a lot of campuses all over the nation have put on.”
Smith said she hopes the service day will be done every year at USU and become a campus tradition during A-Week.
Smith said the projects are about more than just doing service on Aggie Service Day.
“Part of this is that we want to encourage people that go do these services to maybe go back another time and become a more permanent volunteer at these organizations,” Smith said.
Mason Brown and Chelsey Womack helped coordinate the service day.
Brown said he’ll be working specifically at the heritage center for the service and the party afterward. The party will have food, games, a fire and more, Brown said.
Womack will be helping with the highway cleanup, she said.
Womack and Brown said they think the service day will go smoothly, even though it’s the first time it’s being done at USU.
Smith sent an e-mail about the service day through the service center to people who have already shown interest in doing service, but there’s no limit to the amount of people that can help, she said.
“This is definitely something that anybody can come do,” Smith said. “The idea is that we really want to have it be a day where the entire campus does service.”
Smith went on to say she thinks the service day will be really fun.
“The more people we have, the more fun it’s going to be and the more successful it’ll be in the coming years,” Smith said.
– blaze.bullock@aggiemail.usu.edu