It must be December. The whipping wind stings through layers of North Face, College Library fills with coffee guzzlers poring over final review sheets and on the corner of State Street a bell rings to solicit your change. Students value every cent scrimped for shopping and every moment saved for studying, so perhaps they bypass that red Salvation Army bucket one more time and head home out of the cold.
Although
eed knows no season,"" the holidays are a particularly strained time for needy members of the Madison community. They are also a notoriously busy time for students, and volunteering may fall low on the priority list.
""I balance work with a full course load; I just don't have time,"" UW-Madison sophomore Molly King said.
Many students share this view.
However, UW-Madison has a progressive history of volunteering that often goes unrecognized. UW-Madison has sent more student volunteers to the Peace Corps than any other university in the nation for the past ten years. The UW-Madison Student Organizations Web site lists dozens of groups centered around charity event planning. However, many outreach services and shelters testify to a ""semester slump"" in the volunteer ranks as the year's end approaches.
Grace Helms is the coordinator for student volunteering at the Salvation Army Learning Center in Madison. She admits it is difficult to retain regular volunteers.
""We do have a hard time finding enough volunteers,"" she said. ""It would be nice to find more students willing to help out, especially because we try to provide the kids at the shelter with one-on-one attention, and that's hard to do when there are 20 kids and only seven volunteers.""
The Greek system has a long history of holiday service projects within the community. This year, Project G.I.V.E., which stands for Greeks Involved In Volunteer Excellence, will be conducting the NBC-15 ""Share Your Holidays"" food drive. The sororities and fraternities pair up to canvas Madison neighborhoods gathering food and cash donations. Last year, the event collected 3,000 pounds of food.
""As college students, we are lucky to have the physical and mental capacity to help those who need us, and too often we take that for granted,"" said Kate Hogan, the Greek Council Community Service Chair at UW-Madison. ""Madison isn't by any means a large city, yet there are so many community centers that serve impoverished families, soup kitchens, kids who don't get to celebrate Halloween in their own neighborhoods and organizations that are struggling to find volunteers.\
