Volunteer’s tale: Day of Service

Check it out! Student journalists (like me) will be giving you coverage all day of Inauguration events at the Chicago Studies webpage.

Here's my first piece:

CHICAGO — Rev. C.T. Vivian wanted the crowd to know about a “mighty force” that has the power to decide what congressmen will do, a force that is able build more houses than any architect.

“It’s not God,” the Baptist minister and friend to Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech over MLK Weekend.

And it isn’t Barack Obama either, he said. “Obama wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for this mighty force. He wouldn’t have even been a senator.”

Vivian was talking about the spirit of volunteerism—the same force that assembled hundreds of volunteers, including 120 from the University of Chicago, at the United Center at 8:30 on Saturday morning, to prepare for a day of civic engagement through service.

Chicago Cares, a non-profit group that organizes volunteer projects throughout Chicago, organized the Jan. 17 Day of Service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Chicago Cares also arranged for Vivian, a champion of King’s message of non-violent action, to speak to volunteers the morning of the service project.

Just as Chicago Cares asked volunteers across the city to set aside time for community service, Brooke Fallon, a fourth-year in the College, asked University students to set aside their textbooks and spend the day painting classrooms and building bookshelves at nearby Fiske Elementary School.

“I am really impressed with the fact that so many students care enough about the community to take a full day out of their schedule, wake up early and come do something like this,” said Fallon, the University’s Day of Service coordinator. “The library isn’t going anywhere.”

Fiske, a prekindergarten through eighth-grade school located at the corner of 62nd Street and Ingleside Avenue, is just blocks away from campus and several dorms. But it may as well have been in a different world for the some University’s volunteers making their first foray into Woodlawn, a high-poverty neighborhood with historically tenuous University relations.

For fourth-year Stephan Skepnek, the Day of Service provided the perfect opportunity to spend his day outside of Hyde Park, and away from students’ usual off-campus haunts.

“One of my biggest regrets after having spent the last four years in Chicago is that I don’t know most of the city. It’s just so easy, once you get comfortable in Hyde Park and develop a close group of friends, to become insulated. But I think getting out into the city and exploring is really a part of what being a college student is,” he said.

Skepnek attended the Day of Service with his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon.

Though the Day of Service honors King’s memory, Skepneck had President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration at the front of his mind. It was hard not to—several classroom walls featured cut-out news articles about Obama and a collection of student essays titled “If I Were President…”

“[Obama] inspired a lot of youth to really get proactive, so hopefully he can just keep it going,” Skepnek said. “I didn’t begin volunteering because of Obama, but I think he has gotten me to step back and think about my relationship to the community.”


Chicago Studies is a project of the College in partnership with the University Community Service Center. Chicago Studies is funded in part by the Women's Board. © 2008 The University of Chicago