Over 500 students came out for free food, music and most importantly community service. The Year of Service is the part of the inauguration for President David Rudd, who wants to focus on service to the community.
The goal of the Year of Service is to provide 500,000 combined hours of service to Memphis and the surrounding communities by the end of the fall semester. The planning for the Year of Service initiative started late October early November of last year.
“He was thinking about his inauguration, rather than having one traditional academic event, he wanted to focus on the connection between the U of M and the city as a whole,” said Chief Information Officer and Vice Provost Ellen Watson. “ The University students, faculty, staff already do a lot of service but this gives a chance to maybe find out about organizations they didn’t know about.”
In conjunction with the Year of Service initiative the U of M has established a matching goal to secure 500,000 in need-based scholarships can keep the doors of education open.
“All of our scholarships from the university at the moment are merit based. What we’re finding is we’ve got student who have needs. Were looking for donors to match a dollar for an hour. That money will go to need based scholarship rather than merit based scholarships,” said Watson.
Forty organizations signed up for the event and 39 showed up. The event ran out of the 500 passport handouts they had printed to give to students.
The Memphis Public Library was one organization that participated in the Year of Service. According to Terrice Thomas they were offering students opportunities to work in the bookstore, and read to children. At the end of the event they had 35 students to sign up.
Sophomore, Britney McGhee learned about the year of service during Resident Assistant training and since it was also her New Years’ resolution to volunteer more, she decided to come out to the event.
“I decided I was going to make myself get involved and what better way for me to find out about multiple opportunities all at my fingertips,” McGhee said.
During the event McGhee signed up for multiple volunteer opportunities, however she was especially connected to one.
“I signed up for the Alzheimer’s Association, because Alzheimer’s runs in my family and someone passed away from Alzheimer’s so I really wanted to enthrall myself and put myself in that so that I can understand it more,” McGhee said.
The King, Elvis, channeled through Judge Butch Childers was in town and performed all of his classic songs to entertain the students and faculty at the event.
“This is a wonderful event, and I am really excited about so many young people offering their service to these different agencies,” Childers said.
