Into the Streets
800 student volunteers, four hours, and a lot of hard work is what made up this years Into the Streets event day. For the past seven years the student body at Morningside College has participated in an all campus event day focused on volunteer service in the Siouxland Community. Volunteer students are sent out to different organizations and agencies in the Siouxland Community to help in any way they can.
This tradition has grown in size over the years, to include two thirds of the Morningside student body and many organizations in nearby cities. Students have done many different activities over the years, ranging from playing with kids to prairie cleanup. Into the Streets has become such a well-known event that organizations look forward to the help all year. Some organizations are able to save weeks of work on this day due to the volunteers.
The director of the Crittenton Center’s Emergency Shelter said, “The volunteers did such a great job. What they did would have taken us months to do.” Regarding the painting and cleaning that the Morningside Men’s Basketball team did for them.
This volunteer service day sets Morningside apart from other colleges. Few colleges set out a day during the busy semester for students to volunteer in the community. What also sets apart this day is the fact that these students are simply doing this because they want to. Students are not required to participate and do not get class credit if they participate. Over the past five years participation has grown from 200 students to 800 students. This says a lot about the student body at Morningside and what is important to them.
This is also a really unique event because it is completely student planned. The honor society Omicron Delta Kappa hosts the event every year. This is an honor society for upperclassman students. In this society there is a committee devoted to the planning and preparation of the event. This committee worked tirelessly to find organizations willing to participate, as well as students willing to participate. This may sound easy after six years of positive feedback, but this process takes months.
One of the co-chairs of the committee, Emily Greenlee has said, “This was the best committee ever. Over the past four years, I think this was the smoothest the behind the scenes work as gone.”
She was co-chairs with Sarah Sorenson and they had a committee of nine people they were able to delegate work to. This committee with the co-chairs called close to 125 agencies in the Siouxland area. This calling takes hours to complete as the committee members are working with the schedules of the agencies. The committee though successfully found 831 slots for students. While this was over the 800 students that signed up, this was a problem that they greatly preferred to have. Past years had more students than slots, which is a harder problem to solve.
Into the Streets represents the mission statement of the college. It takes a great deal of work by dedicated students to plan and hard work from the students who volunteer. Overall two thirds of the student body has participated the past four years and plan to continue that trend in the future.