About 20 University students gathered in the Rotunda for a training session Saturday that was unlike most introductory sessions on Grounds. Instead of learning how to get along with their dorm mates, make good cappuccinos or operate Windows 98, the participants convened to learn about something more rewarding - community service.
The training session participants actually were first-year service chairs for the Virginia Service Coalition getting acquainted with the ins and outs of their new jobs.
The VSC was established in the fall of 1998 when Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America. At the time, 12 University organizations were holding drives for clothing and canned goods, as well as arranging other methods to aid the victims. Although the drives were successful, a few members of the University's service community decided that the efforts would have yielded even better results if they were organized and centralized.
It was "not as good as it could have been," said fourth-year College student Dave Wilkinson, who founded the Coalition along with fourth-year College student Frank Griffiths and 1998 graduate Maunank Shaw.
"We realized that there was so much more that we could do, to make service a bigger part of life in the community," Wilkinson said.
Now in its second year, VSC acts as an umbrella organization for on-Grounds service groups including Madison House. VSC helps groups with publicity, recruitment, information sharing, networking and resource exchange.
VSC also performs services for the University, such as keeping track of service hours performed by students and sponsoring University-wide initiatives.
Along with Resident Life, VSC established the first-year service chair positions to form a kind of community service congress. The group provides service chairs with information on community service opportunities on Grounds so they in turn can share the information with students in their living areas.
"I want to better understand the opportunities for service at U.Va. and then relay them back to my building," said Courtney Lodge, a first-year College student and service chair.
There are 22 first-year representatives, one from each first-year dorm.
The chairs were elected through Resident Life and their dormitories. Upperclass living areas also have service chairs and will be offered a training session within the next two months.
The training session was organized by VSC and later brought to Resident Life as a way for the first-year service chairs to learn about their positions.
At the meeting, Wilkinson, also a member of the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity, helped train the new service chairs.
Wilkinson said the session aimed to give the first-year service chairs "the tools [they] need to be future service leaders at U.Va." and provide them with "the information that we would have liked to have when we started out."
"They'll know where to take any service-interested people in their dorms," said second-year College student Stephanie Wilson, who shares the position of co-executive coordinator of VSC with Griffiths and Wilkinson.
"While there's a lot out there, it may be hard for them to get into it," Wilson said.
In the three-hour training session, the service chairs attended four workshops. The first focused on fundraising, obtaining supplies and publicity, while the second looked at project assessment and volunteer motivation.
Two other workshops discussed service groups and opportunities both on Grounds and in Charlottesville.
VSC puts out a biweekly service update which provides information on what groups around Grounds are doing, as well as a service directory that is essentially a "Yellow Pages of all service groups on Grounds," Wilkinson said.
The new service chairs will be able to use all VSC's new resources to inform the residents in their dorms about service opportunities.
"I think they offer such a great variety of community service opportunities," Resident Life Co-Chair Esther Adams said. "It's wonderful in helping programming and getting first-years involved in the greater Charlottesville community."
"It's a good way to give back to the community," first-year College student Kelly Polk said. "And I thought that it would be a good way to continue my community service at U.Va."
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