On November 2, the Office of Civic Engagement celebrated their 10th anniversary of being civically engaged by hosting a community service project.
With over 50 volunteers, the office held a fall clean-up of two community gardens in Provo, shares Tricia Shuetzler, manager of the Office of Civic Engagement.
The office partnered with Provo City, Community Action Services and Food Bank, BYU Sustainability office, MyHometown Initiative, and the BYU Community Clean-up Club, Schuetzler explains.
“Those gardens help serve members of the community, and the extra food from the gardens goes to Community Action Services and Food Bank,” she says.
The volunteers included both BYU students and members of the nearby community, according to Schuetzler. One of the participants and student employees of the office, Jaden Boyer, talks about why the office chose to do this event.
“Our scripture is ‘Be anxiously engaged in a good cause,’ and so we thought this (project) fit our theme perfectly where it gets us out in the community and helps us to be anxiously engaged in building a better community for families and for students,” Boyer says.
Another employee, Juliana Banks, who works as a project assistant for the Civic Engagement office, helped plan the service project as well as get the word out to students.
“Civic Engagement is all about being involved in the community, and I feel like this project perfectly highlighted this! There's no better way to celebrate than to get out and serve,” she says.
Banks talks about the reactions of other volunteers, saying they “were grateful to just get out and serve.” She adds that she was happy to have a short-term, “non-committal” service project, as it is hard for her to join semester-long service projects as a pre-med student.
“I think... it really resonated with lots of the students that came. Lots of people told me afterwards, ‘I feel so good being able to serve and like this is an awesome thing because it's not like a super committal thing either like lots of the service projects that you have,’” Boyer says.
Boyer states that many people were able to enjoy serving for a couple of hours and feel good about themselves at the service project.
The volunteers, he continues, were also able to enjoy some of the vegetables they were harvesting for the project. In fact, the cherry tomatoes he tried were the best he had “ever had.”
“I was just getting to try all this food, but you know, it's super fun just being able to sit there and harvest all the vegetables and talk to the other volunteers,” he states.
“In college, I’ve found that I miss doing service projects. The Office of Civic Engagement has given me so many opportunities to connect with others in my community to make an impact. I would be a lot less involved if it wasn't for them,” Banks says.
Visit the Civic Engagement homepage to discover more opportunities to become civically involved.