Students start community service curriculum through ASPiRE

Jessica Dahlberg
Contributing Writer

The West Grace South dorms are home to a group of students who participate in a community engagement living-learning program called Academic Scholars Program in Real Environments (ASPiRE).

One hundred and forty eight of VCU’s sophomore class are the first students to participate in the program, which began this semester. In order for these students to receive a certificate they must complete nine credit hours and 100 hours of community service. The program takes two years to complete.

Shelby Patty, an accounting and finance major, is currently enrolled in one of the groundwork courses for the program: Foundations of Community Engagement. She said the class provides a basis for what community engagement is, but also teaches her, and her classmates, other values.

“It’s also about helping us understand what it really means to be involved in the community, and knowing how to change it based off what (the community) needs rather than just what we think it needs,” Patty said.

When it comes to the 100 hours of community service, the students can choose a focus of health, youth, environment or art. Patty chose youth.

“My older sister had her son really, really young, so I was there a lot raising him,” Patty said. “I know what it’s like to see a kid grow up in an environment that really isn’t the best situation… (it) made me really want to help kids and give them a better chance.”

Thirty of the ASPiRE students, Patty included, recently volunteered at Mosby Court, a residential neighborhood near campus. While there, the students set up a craft booth where the children of the community could come up and cut out a shape, write a wish on it ,and then place it on a tree which was planted later that day.

“There was so much poverty there, we couldn’t believe it because it’s so close to home,” Devon Garrett, a mass communications major, said. “Those people are barely holding on, and you don’t understand it until you see it first-hand.”

To find out about the volunteer opportunities available, the students have to only open their inbox. They receive an monthly e-mail with a calendar listing all of the events, which can range from a night in the dorm packing school supplies into backpacks for local students, to participating in all-day community events. Maxwell Langhorst, a chemistry major, said completing the hours of community service should not be hard because there are endless volunteer opportunities going on during the week, as well as the weekend.

Langhorst has done community service before, through church and in the Dominican Republic, but he thinks there is something special about volunteering with ASPiRE.

“It’s a lot different because that was getting involved in the community in the Dominican, because this (ASPiRE) is getting involved three blocks away,” Langhorst said. “It’s a lot closer to home…you see the difference more…its more personal with people you will see again.”

Community involvement and positive change is the foundation of ASPiRE, according to the program’s mission statement. Whether it is going out and giving back to the community, or living in the  dorm and helping in other ways for two years.

“Last year I wasn’t engaged in VCU, but once I got involved in ASPiRE I actually cared,” Garrett said. “I live with these people; we are together all of the time. It’s hard to not fall in love with these people.”