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I am Joanie Hendricks.
I work in the financial aid office
here at Wright State University
I've been here for fifteen years and I am co-chair of We Serve U.
We Serve U is an initiative that allows staff
to engage in significant community service opportunities.
We began in January of 2011.
We're trying to do at least a quarterly project.
We're still very new but it seems like we're taking on more opportunities
and we're getting more involvement from the staff which is wonderful.
We Serve U began
as an initiative of
the university staff counsel. Jackie Neal and myself
went to the staff counsel and
proposed that we
become more organized and try to get as many people involved on-campus in
community service activities in at least a quarterly basis.
We've actually had wonderful outpouring from other organizations.
We've had different colleges donate things for raffles. We've done fundraisers.
The bookstore, athletics, the Nutter Center, the president's office,
and we are starting to get more student volunteers for the activities that we're
offering.
Our most recent project was making cards for the children at Children's
Medical Center.
Children's Medical Center puts a get-well or holiday card on each child's
meal tray and so we had
almost a hundred staff and students stop in. We just did it over a lunch
hour, asked people to stop in and make cards.
We had a turn out that we just really didn't expect. It was at break time
didn't think there would be a lot of staff around and we
were just overwhelmed with the support. People are really interested in getting
involved in this sort of thing, especially towards the holidays. Its a lot of fun to serve the
community in this way. Particularly because they don't really have the time
to be able to do it outside of working hours. It's a nice feeling
to be able to spend a lunch hour coming together and working on something
to help the community. We also recently had donation drives and raffles at
the Nutter Center
for Blue Star Mothers who send
care packages to the deployed troops
In addition to that, we've helped Ronald McDonald House, Hospice.
To find out more about our organization just go to our website
we list our
current projects, our upcoming projects.
There's also a link too different volunteer opportunities throughout the
community.
We feel that
everyone benefits from We Serve U,
staff, students,
and the community.
It's part of Wright State's
mission, to transform the communities we serve, and we feel we are helping
to meet that goal.
It's really exciting to be a part of this group because it's very new.
We've only been around for less than a year and already we're having such
such good impact
there so many people who are wanting to participate and we're really excited about it.
And we welcome any new volunteers that would like to help out for any event or if you'd
like to become a member of our committee.
You can go on the website and we would welcome any help we can get.