With classes at Winthrop University not being held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a number of students made the most of the day off by helping others.
The Day of Service has been held at Winthrop since 2000, according to Program Director for Volunteer and Community Service in the Center for Career and Civic Engagement Laura Foster.
Winthrop’s website describes the 2020 Day of Service as honoring King’s “legacy of service by working with the community and building unity and relationships across campuses and communities around the world.”
“It’s old school, and it’s looked different over the years,” Foster said.
She said that the current model for the Day of Service is “working several different sites.”
“In fact, we have 12 community partners and 31 projects,” Foster said.
One project that was undertaken by volunteers from Winthrop came from a partnership with the Adult Enrichment Centers. The AEC’s website describes the organization as a “not-for-profit multi-generational community that engages adults of all abilities in community programs that promote inclusion and independence.”
Amber Hanning, the program coordinator for the High Five group at the AEC’s Rock Hill location said that the partnership was formed when Foster reached out to the AEC’s CEO about “wanting to have a group of her volunteers come and work one-on-one with members of our program.”
Hanning described the volunteer project as “wonderful” in an email to The Johnsonian and said that the project was a way to “introduce our center and programming to new Winthrop volunteer students to grow our already existing volunteer and internship we have with Winthrop students that has been an absolute success and exceedingly [beneficial] to our programming.”
Hanning said that Foster had brought up the idea of creating an “ocean in a bottle” which she described as “a way of creating a sensory bottle with a theme.”
“A sensory bottle is used to encourage sensory stimulation which can promote calmness and concentration,” Hanning said, adding that those are “a few of the many benefits of sensory stimulation in the population of adults of all abilities that we serve.”
Hanning said that the AEC was also sending “a small group of our members to team up with another group of volunteers at the community garden.”
Foster said that Rock Hill’s community garden has plots that can be rented by anyone for a reasonable price. Furthermore, the garden has a master gardener that works with the people who have rented plots and answers questions and offers advice on what should be planted when. Foster said that the work that was done by volunteers would include painting the plots, cleaning up the garden and working on building a seventeenth plot.
Having multiple service projects around the city allowed for organizers to focus on a variety of issues that face our community, including lack of access to water faced by the homeless and those living in the Blackmon Road area.
The Day of Service also saw volunteers working at shelters for the homeless and the disadvantaged, including Pathways and Pilgrim’s Inn as well as working with local resale stores that support a local hospice house and a women’s shelter.
Photo: Maggie Claytor/ The Johnsonian
