CSRSOs Hit the Ground Running

Here's my first article for the University Community Service Center's newsletter:

Rachel Cromidas

When first-year Tiera Johnson attended the RSO Fair on Oct. 3, she was overwhelmed by the number of diverse community service organizations to chose from.

“I knew I wanted to do a volunteer program that had to with kids,” Johnson said.

In the end, she joined Friends of Washington Park, an after-school tutoring group that works with children in kindergarten through ninth grade at the School of Social Service Administration (SSA).

UCSC advises nearly 50 community service-related Registered Student Organizations (known as CSRSOs), and more than a dozen of them involve tutoring students from around Chicago. Johnson said she chose to join Friends of Washington Park because the program allows volunteers to work with students of many different ages.

Friends of Washington Park is run by Chicago Youth Programs, a non-profit organization serving at-risk youth in Cabrini Green, Washington Park and Uptown. The program pairs each tutor with one student for the entire year to foster a one-on-one learning environment and create lasting bonds between the programs participants. The program meets every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 5 to 6:30 p.m., and often schedules weekend activities, such as a trip to the Midway ice skating rink, for tutors and their students.

For Andrew Seeder, a fourth-year and co-president of Friends of Washington Park Tutoring , the program has helped him stay in touch with the “real world” during his time at the college.

“There’s more to being 18 to 22 years old than studying for your next midterm,” Seeder said. “Even though this might not relate to my class on Nietszche, I still get an education here.”

Seeder, a Tutorial Studies major, joined the program as a first year and immediately developed a rapport with his tutee, Marquis. “He became a part of my life.”

Malika Krishna, also co-president, shares Seeder’s sentiment about the co-curricular value of their CSRSO.

“I’m an economics major, so a lot of stuff I do is quantitative. It’s nice to come here and get in touch with why we’re doing all that.”

Other mentoring CSRSOs include WYSE, a curriculum-based program that pairs female college students with girls in middle school from Little Village; South Side Scribblers, an organization that teaches creative writing to elementary school students in Hyde Park; Peer Health Exchange and Project Health—both of which are branches of national non-profits and mobilize Uchicago students to educate Chicago’s underserved populations about the health resources available to them.

UChicago students with an interest in policy-making and prevention also have a panoply of options, from environmental groups like Green Awareness in Action (GAIA), to the UChicago branch of Colleges against Cancer, which is planning to host the college’s first 24-hour Relay for Life fundraiser for cancer research this Spring.

One such CSRSO is the Partnership for the Advancement of Refugee Rights (PARR). This new student group, formed in winter of 2008, is engaging human rights issues by connecting UChicago students with Chicago’s refugee community.

According to Aruj Chaudhry, the founding chair and president, PARR is a great organization for students in “all facets of refugee rights work.” This is because PARR is organized into three committees: a Committee on Global Vigilance, a Committee on Community Service, and a Committee on Advocacy and Activism, all of which will work on different projects, Chaudhry, a fourth-year, said.

The Committee on Community Service, for example, is planning to partner students with World Relief, a refugee center offering resettlement aid and legal services, and lead visits to refugees’ homes.

“We will also go up north to do some ESL tutoring,” Chaudhry said. “We want to involve the University community in global and local issues.”

One important aspect of the program, she added, is shared leadership. “Everyone has a chance to lead the meetings. Our mission is mutual education.”