Enthusiastic ALES students diverted hundreds of useable items from the landfill, tidied yards, prepared gardens, and donated many other hours of elbow-grease to Project Serve on September 19.
ALES' Project Serve is a community service-learning initiative that offers students hands-on experiences outside the classroom, volunteering for half a day with local organizations that focus on issues relevant to the Faculty of ALES, such as sustainability, food security and agriculture.
Rashell Bolduc, one of 95 students who participated this year, helped clean up around a heritage house at a farm site of the Whitemud Equine Learning Centre Association. The non-profit organization, which provides city-dwellers easy access to horses for mental health and physical therapy, urban youth self-esteem and general learning about horse farms, wants to use the building as an office.
"We took some of the stress off and that allows them to focus on the more important things, like the horses," said Bolduc, a first-year Environmental and Conservation Sciences student. "This experience has built my belief in volunteer work."
There is statistical research showing that students engaged in community service-learning experiences tend to achieve better academically, said Katherine Zwicker, ALES' Student Engagement Coordinator, probably because it gives them a real-life taste of what they're studying.
Additionally, Project Serve provides a great opportunity for first-year students, who made up half of this year's group, to meet peers from their own program and other faculty departments, right away.
From Dean Stan Blade's perspective, it also gives them the opportunity to form a great habit.
"You're going to do great things today, but the world is so much bigger than this," he said at the kickoff breakfast, as he encouraged students to make volunteering a lifelong fixture in their personal and professional lives.
This year, the event's fourth edition, students were deployed to eight organizations, including Edmonton's Food Bank, the Edmonton Organic Growers Guild, Edmonton Reuse Centre, Green and Gold Garden, Prairie Urban Farm, Whitemud Equine Learning Centre Association, Wildlife Rehabilitation Society of Edmonton and YESS: Youth Empowerment & Support Services.
In addition to clearing a yard at the Whitemud Equine Learning Centre of weeds and concrete slabs, washing down the building's kitchen and bathroom and vacuuming the basement, they powered through many other time-consuming tasks. At the Prairie Urban Farm, they harvested food for a canning workshop and built an herb spiral garden and trellis. At the Reuse Centre, they painstakingly separated typical donations - boxes filled pell-mell with half-used crayons, popsicle sticks, small plastic toys, etc.
"We get 20 tonnes of donations every month and volunteers sort 80 per cent of it," said Sarah Snider, the centre's volunteer coordinator. "We really could not function without volunteers."
Reuse exists to challenge the idea of what is and is not garbage and to change people's behavior when discarding stuff, she said. Although flyers and ads help get the word out, people actually seeing what comes in and how it can be repurposed, as the ALES students did, is far more effective, and important.
"The best way to change behavior is through modelling and conversation," said Snider.
ALES' Project Serve is a community service-learning initiative that offers students hands-on experiences outside the classroom, volunteering for half a day with local organizations that focus on issues relevant to the Faculty of ALES, such as sustainability, food security and agriculture.
Rashell Bolduc, one of 95 students who participated this year, helped clean up around a heritage house at a farm site of the Whitemud Equine Learning Centre Association. The non-profit organization, which provides city-dwellers easy access to horses for mental health and physical therapy, urban youth self-esteem and general learning about horse farms, wants to use the building as an office.
"We took some of the stress off and that allows them to focus on the more important things, like the horses," said Bolduc, a first-year Environmental and Conservation Sciences student. "This experience has built my belief in volunteer work."
There is statistical research showing that students engaged in community service-learning experiences tend to achieve better academically, said Katherine Zwicker, ALES' Student Engagement Coordinator, probably because it gives them a real-life taste of what they're studying.
Additionally, Project Serve provides a great opportunity for first-year students, who made up half of this year's group, to meet peers from their own program and other faculty departments, right away.
From Dean Stan Blade's perspective, it also gives them the opportunity to form a great habit.
"You're going to do great things today, but the world is so much bigger than this," he said at the kickoff breakfast, as he encouraged students to make volunteering a lifelong fixture in their personal and professional lives.
This year, the event's fourth edition, students were deployed to eight organizations, including Edmonton's Food Bank, the Edmonton Organic Growers Guild, Edmonton Reuse Centre, Green and Gold Garden, Prairie Urban Farm, Whitemud Equine Learning Centre Association, Wildlife Rehabilitation Society of Edmonton and YESS: Youth Empowerment & Support Services.
In addition to clearing a yard at the Whitemud Equine Learning Centre of weeds and concrete slabs, washing down the building's kitchen and bathroom and vacuuming the basement, they powered through many other time-consuming tasks. At the Prairie Urban Farm, they harvested food for a canning workshop and built an herb spiral garden and trellis. At the Reuse Centre, they painstakingly separated typical donations - boxes filled pell-mell with half-used crayons, popsicle sticks, small plastic toys, etc.
"We get 20 tonnes of donations every month and volunteers sort 80 per cent of it," said Sarah Snider, the centre's volunteer coordinator. "We really could not function without volunteers."
Reuse exists to challenge the idea of what is and is not garbage and to change people's behavior when discarding stuff, she said. Although flyers and ads help get the word out, people actually seeing what comes in and how it can be repurposed, as the ALES students did, is far more effective, and important.
"The best way to change behavior is through modelling and conversation," said Snider.