By Jacob Barkman
Contributing Writer
Saturday morning arrives. You wake up at 7:30 a.m., shower, and get dressed. You walk downstairs and meet your RA or walk to campus and meet up with your group. You are brought to the registration table, where a few students and some faculty members help you sign in. You walk upstairs to the gym, and walk up to the set of tables where a group of students and faculty members give you your shirt. Then you walk over to the tables in the corner where some breakfast has been laid out by a volunteers.
The time gets to 8:45 a.m. and Father Chris begins his prep talk before sending you out to get your materials to hop on the bus. Finally at 9:00 a.m., they send you out to the buses.
You and your group walk over to the commuter parking lot where a group of students, led fearlessly by Sr. Sean, gives you all the materials you need for your volunteering. You get on the buses that have been organized by Ken Scott and his group of student assistants. Everyone is on their way to go out and do some good. While everyone is out, Joan and her staff work tirelessly to make sure there are no “in the field” problems.
You work your butt off for the agency and get tons of stuff done. The buses come back, pick you up and bring you back to campus. Waiting for you in the gym is a lunch of pizza and sodas that have been set up, once again, by a group of students led by Joan. You eat your lunch and decide to head on back to your dorm room. It’s 1:30 p.m. Your day of working and doing good out in the Capital District is done.
During your day you encountered a plethora of students, faculty and staff that worked hard to help make your experience seem flawless. But what didn’t you see? What happened behind the scenes that led up to this massive event?
Something that all the participants are blind to is the committee made up of students, staff and faculty working tirelessly to help this event happen. A few weeks before the end of the spring semester, a group of students, faculty and staff gather in the Sanctuary library.
They start on what the logo on the shirt will look like, what the quote on the back of the shirt will be for that year, and what color the shirts and text will be. They help decide where the groups of students will be going on the big day. Staff members like Ken Scott arrange for all the transportation and Ruth Holt oversees the registration process. August rolls around and everyone comes back to school.
In the midst of starting a new semester, with new classes, new roommates, and a new set of responsibilities, these brave students return to the Sanctuary to finish the work they started months before. But the pressure is on for this fearless group. They only have two weeks to put the finishing touches on everything.
A lot of the tasks that lay ahead for this group when they return are things that have to be done in a limited amount of time. After the sign-up process closes, they have to work quickly to finalize the numbers. I use the term “finalized” loosely here because they never represent the final number.
We lose and gain a number of students up until the minute we send them out on the buses, then we start working on where to send those volunteers. The agencies that were contacted have a limited amount of people that each of them can accept, so the hard decisions that have to be made start to surface. Using the numbers they have and the numbers requested, Joan and her committee put everything together like a big puzzle. This puzzle is worked on until the Thursday before the event, which is where the work ethic comes in.
Being a part of this group of students means a few things. But first and foremost, it means energy. You have to have a lot of it, and it all has to be positive. There’s no room anywhere here for pessimism or ‘Negative Nancys.’
At any given point in the weeks leading up to Reach Out you can find this group of students working diligently in silence, playing hard but working harder, eating food, drinking some tea, organizing team leader files, napping, or just filling the air with a light heart to keep those tasks that require few hands light, easy and stress free. It’s the spirit that these students, faculty, staff and alumni bring in the late hours, hidden in the library of the Sanctuary, which brings this whole event together.
I’ve let you all have a little glimpse of the many things that this group does to shed some light on a few things. Keep these people and everything they go through to make this event happen in mind the next time you participate.
Having been among them for the last two years, I can attest to the fact that they only want the best for the event, and do everything they can do, so thank them for it.
