Simpsonian

Junior Cassie Schmidt helps kids decorate Frisbees at the Little Sibs Weekend carnival hosted by First Year Council. Little Sibs Weekend is the main volunteer activity for the freshman student group. File Photo [Click to enlarge]

Simpson College students, staff and faculty have been an active part of the larger community with service for some time now. That involvement is still growing thanks to the Lilly Initiative.

The Lilly Initiative is a larger part of service. It helps students to have a reflective process that will enhance their understanding of vocation and gives them an opportunity to explore what a "calling" means in their life.

The Lilly Initiative was started in 1937 with the Eli Lilly Families Endowment. The Endowment supports the causes of religion, education and community development and has been gifted to 88 church-related liberal arts colleges.

"When the Lilly grant came on campus, that then gave us additional resources for organizing and coordinating volunteering on campus," said Jan Everhart, assistant professor of religion and director of the Lilly Initiative. "We are doing a lot more data collection and we have the ability to develop a sophisticated service site, as well as a Web site so people can go to the web and find out a lot more about volunteering opportunities."

The Lilly Initiative has three main goals. First, the project's goal is to provide opportunities for a reflective process in service. Second, the Lilly Initiative urges a civic engagement through internships, service-learning and alternative break trips, along with with journaling and reflection, integrate the experiences a student has into a broad understanding of vocation. A final goal is to identify, encourage and support students with a sense of calling to ministry.

"I think Alice Walker put it pretty well, 'a service is the rent we pay for living on the planet,' " Everhart said. "It's just part of being a responsible community member. To realize if everybody helps take care of the world and care about the quality of life for other human beings, then the world's going to be a better place for everybody."

The Lilly Initiative supports not only students getting involved with the community and the world they live in, but to be creative in their drive to help others. One of the ways the program assists students in their endeavors is through "mini grants."

"One of the things we have with the Lilly Initiative is what we call mini-grants," said Jim Hayes, service hub director, assistant director of the Lilly Initiative and instructor in philosophy and religion. "That second goal of community service is where this mini-grant thing came from. What we found early on was that people were coming up with creative ideas to access our funds, but their ideas didn't fit in well with the programs or scholarships, so we started setting money aside and calling it a mini-grant."

One student who chose to access this opportunity for a mini-grant is senior Allison Thelin, student hall coordinator. Thelin has taken the money allotted to her and used it to assist those living at Oakridge, subsidized housing units in Des Moines.

"I am taking Ethics 105 with Allison Wolf and she has us volunteer once a week and I am volunteering at Oakridge," Thelin said. "I came up with an idea during a session with one of the CA's when we were trying to come up with programs for citizenship. I thought it would be great to get the CA's to get their residents together so we can make 300 goodie bags for Oakridge's Fall Fest."

The goodie bags contain coloring and game books, crayons, stickers, small toys and candy. The money to buy the supplies for these bags came from the funding from the mini-grant.

According to Hayes, experiences such as Ullman has had working with Oakridge are considered experiences with "the other."

"(This happens) when we have an encounter with what we classify here as 'the other,' somebody whose life experiences are really different from our own based on issues of gender, economic status, culture and age differences," Hayes said. "When you meet somebody whose life experiences are different from your own, we feel like that's a reciprocally-enriching encounter. It just changes us when we meet people."

Another aspect of the Lilly Initiative is the Wesley Service Scholarship Program, which gives students $500 per academic year for 80 hours of service. Senior Nina Ward received the scholarship, and was able to increase the amount of civic service she already participated in.

"Well, I have always volunteered here at Simpson, but I am more involved now because I'm part of the Wesley Service Scholarship Program and I have to get 80 hours of community service by the end of the year and write a journal on what I did," Ward said. "I really love to do community service because I feel like I have the time and energy to give to those who don't have the same opportunities as me."

Students can learn more about volunteering opportunities by attending the volunteer fair in BSC on Nov. 2.

Volunteering Opportunities:

� arts and community interests

� environmental issues

� health and safety

� kids and education

� meals and community building

� poverty

� peace and justice

� senior citizens

� special needs/disabilities.

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