Students to Serve During Spring Break
About 340 Westmont students will spend spring break, March 15-19, volunteering for various service projects in Mississippi and Alabama, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Ensenada, Mexico.
More than 60 students will stay in Santa Barbara during their week-long break from school, leading service projects and volunteering with A Rocha, a Christian environmental initiative. This is the second year students have been involved with Spring Break in Santa Barbara. Last year, the group painted fences, assisted with laundry and installed a playground at the Village Apartments, low-income housing complexes on Santa Barbara’s west side.
Beginning Friday, March 12, about 230 students will begin traveling from Westmont to Ensenada for Potter’s Clay, a student-led service trip that began 33 years ago. With the help of volunteer contractors, students will be working at seven construction sites, building six homes and expanding a day care center. Over the past 32 years, students with Potter’s Clay have built 248 homes in the Ensenada area. With the aid of Westmont students, Santa Barbara doctors and dentists hold medical and dental clinics. Other students participate in sports camps and vacation Bible study groups.
“Westmont students get to experience a foreign culture and learn more about themselves, who God is, and what the people of Mexico are all about,” says Co-Director Jordan Evans, a senior from Irvine, Calif. “Potter's Clay is an opportunity to gain perspective on life and understand cultural, social and economic differences.”
Forty Westmont students are volunteering for Spring Break in the City (SBIC), serving the less fortunate in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, the group will distribute food, paint and cleanup area churches and work with an after-school program. In San Francisco, students will run an evening youth program, serve the homeless, work with HIV/AIDS patients and create awareness of the efforts to stop sex trafficking.
“Our goal is to give students a perspective of what the world is like outside of Westmont’s amazingly unique campus,” says SBIC Co-Director Megan Reed. “Together as a team, using our collective talents and willing hearts, we hope to serve others in San Francisco.”
Seven students and a Westmont staff member with Racial Equality and Justice (REJ) will travel to Mississippi and Alabama. The REJ group is in its seventh year serving with the John M. Perkins Foundation in Mississippi and learning about Christian community development and racial and economic justice. Students will continue working on the Zechariah 8 project, which refurbishes homes for underserved families as a pathway to home ownership and provides enriching after-school programs for children and youth. The group will also meet the uncle of a Westmont staff member who served as an attorney in the case against members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls.
Not only are the service trips student-initiated and led, but students are required to raise money for each trip. Students return to class Monday, March 22.