Alternative Spring Break has become a staple of the College Democrats organization. Each year we host information sessions, take applications, and organize a trip for students to take part in service projects in other parts of the country. This will be our sixth year organizing the trip to New Orleans. In 2008, we organized an additional trip option to Mullens, WV and are planning to return for our fourth trip in Spring 2011. Currently, the trip is organized through our service Umbrella Group – Students for Service. Coordinators for the trips are Ganiatu Afolabi and Kaley Hanenkrat.

The idea behind these trips is to further the broad idea of being a Democrat. Rather than some of the purely partisan and political aspects, we see ourselves as creating life-long Democrats and leaders for a progressive country; volunteerism, understanding, and compassion are integral parts of this vision.

The central mission of our trip is reaching out to communities through working along side them to rebuild and repair their homes and provide them with normally inaccessible resources. Many of the people in both communities have gone for years without some of the most basic commodities, such as insulation or a wheelchair ramp, and require the help of outside organizations to secure them.

While the relationship of community service and volunteerism to humanitarianism is very evident in this project, taking politically minded students to different parts of the country in which politics have greatly effected the current situation and process of recovery brings a different experience to these trips than to other service trips. Participants are given a chance to work in the environments they’ve read about and discussed in class and see the implications of the politics they’ve only heard about. An important part of both trips is the discussions that take place over preparing and having dinner at the end of the day. In 2007, these discussions brought participants together to organize a trip to Washington DC to lobby members of Congress for funding for a hospital near their project site.

Our Trips:

New Orleans, Louisiana

A group of students will be volunteering in New Orleans to help with the ongoing recovery effort from Hurricane Katrina. We are working with Lower Nine. This is our sixth trip to New Orleans and will be our second year working with Lower Nine.

Lower Nine will have us working on projects Monday-Friday, 8-5 and expect all volunteers to commit to this schedule full-time. They will provide all necessary project training, tools and safety equipment. Over time projects have moved from solely gutting houses and removing debris to re-building houses and doing much-needed repairs.

The Lower Nine headquarters are located at 6018 El Dorado St. / New Orleans, LA 70117. For more information on Lowernine, check out http://lowernine.org/.

Mullens, West Virginia

A group of students will be traveling to Mullens, West Virginia to perform community service work around the town for one week. Mullens is in one of the poorest areas in the nation. The environmental effects of coal mining have taken a toll on the town, and about five years ago the town was flooded, destroying much of what is in it. Many families live in homes that are falling apart and are in desperate need of repair; other families do not have running or hot water.

Families submit applications for work on their houses to the organization we are working with – RAIL – and we work to respond to as many of these applications as we can in five days. In the past, we scraped and painted an entire house, re-roofed a house, ripped out and replaced the floors in another house, gutted and re-roofed another house, hung dry wall to repair a ceiling, and cleared brush at the site of the late Senator Byrd’s high school that is being made into a park.

Needs in this community are incredibly varied. Sometimes a project is small and simple – such as fixing a broken door or window – but is important because the project helps minimize the cost of maintaining the house (e.g., replacing broken windows can help keep heat in a home) in a community that is populated with people with little money to maintain their houses. Sometimes a project is much larger, such as the one where we replaced the roof on a house that was filled with holes and water poured into the house every time it rained.

We will be working with the Rural Appalachian Improvement League. They run the Mullens Opportunity Center, a community center for the people of Mullens and for groups of volunteers to perform community service.

For more information on the Rural Appalachian Improvement League, check out www.railwv.org/.

For more information on the Alternative Spring Break program, please email the directors at ColumbiaASB@gmail.com.