In an average week, Robyn Sanderson, Sweet Briar’s director of student involvement and programming, has only so much time to devote to student community service activities. If a new student organization becomes a permanent fixture on campus, the busy co-curricular life employee will have some help coordinating volunteerism at the College.

Between 9 a.m. and noon on Saturday, Nov. 1, more than 50 Sweet Briar students will embark on the inaugural “Campus-wide Day of Service,” a day of on- and off-campus community service projects organized by the Student Office of Community Outreach.

The Student Office of Community Outreach, also known as SOCO, was launched as a pilot project this fall by Meagan Bell ’09, Christie Ponton ’09 and Laura McKenna ’10, students in Tom Loftus’ Business Practicum class. The students are supervised by Sanderson and Loftus acts as management consultant.

SOCO was born of a desire expressed by several campus groups – the business management program, the PACE (Promoting Academic and Community Engagement) scholarship program, the co-curricular life office and others – to provide more off-campus community service opportunities for students.

“We thought that the next phase of building our relationships with the local community was to get more students off campus more often,” Loftus said. “A lot of [students] have done good things for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and a lot have done work for Habitat but we want to do more.”

SOCO’s job is to promote volunteerism and community service at Sweet Briar, particularly among the College’s student clubs, which have a requirement to do at least one community service activity each semester. SOCO will monitor the clubs and make sure they meet this obligation.

At the end of the fall semester, the Business Practicum students will present a feasibility study to co-curricular life about whether or not SOCO would be a viable student-run endeavor.

“To generate a self-sustaining culture is the challenge,” Loftus said, adding that the goal is to create hands-on community service opportunities that students can build on and include on resumes. “That’s the vision that [we have].”

On Saturday, some students on campus will bag 8,000 meals for Stop Hunger Now, an organization headed by 1974 Sweet Briar graduate Lee Warren, while the Sweet Spirits, a service group that operates out of the chaplain’s office, will assemble “health kits” for disaster victims and refugees.

According to Chaplain Adam White, the 40 kits, which include a towel, washcloth, soap, toothbrush, bandages and a comb, will be distributed through Church World Service or the United Methodist Committee on Relief, “whichever has the greatest need for them.”

In Amherst, Paws club volunteers will play with animals and clean up at the Amherst County Humane Society. In Lynchburg, Environmental Club members will plant flowers at Lynchburg Grows, while another group will paint a mural at the YWCA on Church Street.

Sanderson said her alma mater, Converse College, has an event similar to the Campus-wide Day of Service. This past summer, she and Ponton, who was working as an intern in co-curricular life, tailored the idea to Sweet Briar. “Christie really laid the foundation for it over the summer,” Sanderson said.

Earlier this semester, SOCO organized a volunteer fair, where 20 local agencies, including Habitat for Humanity, Lynchburg Parks and Recreation and others, set up booths to recruit student volunteers. SOCO hopes to organize another volunteer fair and Campus-wide Day of Service in the spring.

– By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer