By Charlie Johnson

A PC tradition as time-honored as the famed Bronze Derby, Student Volunteer Services has begun another year of student involvement in the Clinton community.

Student Volunteer Services (SVS) is a program run in conjunction with the Chaplain's Office, which provides students an opportunity to connect with an organization of their choice in the Clinton area or a project on campus in order to offer their time and gifts to others. Organizations that SVS works with to place students include several homes for the elderly, local schools, and, most prominently, Thornwell Children's Home, located roughly across the street from campus.

Lucy Strong, the program's sole full-time employee, who oversees four student interns and about 30 program coordinators who work as liaisons between organizations and interested students to meet a program’s needs, guides SVS. The paid student interns are selected through an application process and work to supervise activities with all the organizations and in developing campus events. This year’s SVS interns are Emily Saxon (the senior intern), Liz Boley, Kaley Peek, and Lauren Thomas.

Students committed to service

Strong notes that the level of student commitment to service sets PC apart. She reports that about half of the student body has already gotten involved at this point in the semester, while close to 75 percent of PC students ended up participating in some way last year. Annual numbers like that, she says, are usually only found at colleges that include community service as a part of the graduation requirement, as cultural enrichment programs are at PC. These schools also would typically have more full-time employees to facilitate the mandatory service projects.

While a great deal of service at PC occurs constantly and inconspicuously through the individual efforts of PC students working in conjunction with Thornwell or the Presbyterian Home, who take a certain amount of time each week to visit a "little brother" or "little sister," lead a youth group, or spend time with an older person, SVS is most well-known for its campus activities.  These include Project Life, which encourages the entire campus to become "typed" for a database of potential donors for people in need of bone marrow transplants, and Special Olympics, a one-day outreach that brings out a significant portion of the PC community.

Events bring awareness to SVS 

The Project Life Spaghetti Dinner, a fundraiser to pay for the medical procedures included in extracting and transplanting bone marrow, is scheduled for Feb. 20, 2008, while the actual typing will occur on Feb. 26. Special Olympics takes place each year in the spring, typically in March.  On April 11, 2008, PC will participate in something new, as an "enhancer" for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, a non-competitive walk that remembers those who have died of cancer and honors the survivors of the disease.

Peek cites the college's reputation for service as "one of the reasons I chose PC." In high school, she had helped at a homeless shelter, among other things, and hoped to be able to continue being active in the community at college.

"It was really neat knowing that I could still do that at school even though it’s a small town," she said.

Having volunteered for the Girl Scouts her freshman year, she became a troop leader her sophomore year and has continued her involvement in the program in the midst of her more comprehensive work as an intern. Regarding her decision to volunteer, Peek said, "In service, I see that I have been blessed so much, and it gives me an opportunity to give back some of those blessings."

High level of support for Thornwell

As Strong looks at the year's beginning, she is particularly excited about the higher level of commitment to Thornwell programs that she perceives. One of the greatest goals of SVS as she sees it is to "create a bridge across the street" between Thornwell and PC.  Given the student response this fall, this ideal is not something that is likely to fall through the cracks.

Though Strong is thrilled with the levels of student participation in service that PC displays, she finds something even more remarkable about the makeup of SVS. As she illustrates it, students involved in SVS are "not all Christian Education majors that are involved in Greek life."  Instead, PC student volunteers run the gamut of majors, activities, and interests, making service one of the unifying factors on the Presbyterian College campus.

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