Princeton students do hand-on community service

By Katie Wagner / Staff Writer
   In 90-degree weather one day last week, they pounded on a rectangle of dirt with shovels and raked away weeds to prepare for a new vegetable bed on John Witherspoon Middle School’s campus.
   The group included both incoming Princeton University freshmen and students from Princeton Regional Schools.
   The younger students said they appreciated how hard the Princeton University students worked to build an extension of the John Witherspoon garden — one of several gardens created by Princeton Regional School students and their parents and teachers over the past two years.
   ”These guys are actually determined to help and they’re actually happy to do it,” said Landis Hackett, 12, who will be a sixth-grader at John Witherspoon this school year. “ If there were more kids here, if they were actually working at all you would have to keep telling them to stop talking and keep working. It’s (working with the Princeton University students) actually a lot more fun because you can actually talk and work at the same time.”
   The Princeton University students were members of a new Community Action group, Environmental Awareness.
   Community Action is a pre-orientation, week-long voluntary program led by upper-class students at the university that involves doing community service in Trenton, Philadelphia and the Princeton area. The 20-year-old program, sponsored by the university’s Student Volunteers Council, introduces students to community service opportunities and seeks to encourage them to continue participating in these kinds of activities during their time as university students.
   Community Action’s enrollment grew this year from 113 to 145 freshmen participants in order to offer a new type of community service, said David Brown, the program’s director.
   ”A lot of the work we do is obviously addressing needs, so we have groups at shelters, we have groups at soup kitchens, but this year we also wanted to align ourselves with the assets of these communities in uplifting an area,” Mr. Brown said. “We added an arts group and an environmental group, because we really feel that those are both things that can be used to bring up a community that’s struggling and both groups build on strengths that are already present in the community.
   ”We want to move beyond working alongside those who are responding to needs, which is something that Student Volunteers Council and Community Action will always do, and we want to begin to see how we can recognize and develop the potential that is already there.”
   Of the 145 freshman participating in Community Action this year about 10 participated in Environmental Awareness and 12 participated in The Arts.
   Members of The Arts group worked in Trenton. They painted walls and sorted through donated arts supplies at Artworks, a visual arts center, painted a room and organized and catalogued a music library with members of the Trenton Children’s Chorus and created tolerance-themed art displays with Trenton children.
   Mr. Brown said that working with the chorus was an example of one of the types of service members of The Arts group performed that looked beyond the problems in the community.
   ”The Trenton Children’s Chorus is definitely an asset of the community, because of the music it offers and the talent of the kids involved,” Mr. Brown said. “Music is something people might say you don’t have to have to live, but it is an asset to a community.”
   In addition to assisting the Princeton Regional Schools students with the John Witherspoon garden, participants in Environmental Awareness gave a presentation on recycling and sustainability programs to elementary school students in the district, met Farmers Against Hunger representatives at Strawberry Hill Farm in Bordentown and got to know more about each other and their three student leaders.
   Ariana Tiwari, 18, of Washington, D.C., said she was inspired to apply for the Environmental Awareness group by an environmental science course she took in high school and that community service has always been a big part of her life.
   ”You get to be outside, enjoying the sun while at the same time you’re making an impact,” Ms. Tiwari said about the week’s activities.
   ”Another great part of this group is you get to know your upper class leaders and they reassure you and you get to ask them questions about their own experiences.”
   Jacob Denz, an Environmental Awareness group leader and junior at the university, said he liked that his group was working in Princeton, because it provided an alternative to doing service in a community unfamiliar to most students at the university, like Trenton.
   ”I think it’s great to recognize that it’s not that some communities are perfect and others need help,” Mr. Denz said. “I think it’s good to recognize that there is work that needs to be done everywhere, not just in places like Trenton.”