Volunteer Crews Repair Race Relations

When Tara Green and Barbara Merz make sandwiches for their local soup kitchen, they think they’re only feeding the hungry.

But the two 19-year-old Temple University students are also binding the racial and cultural fragments troubling today’s college campuses.

Tara Green is black; Barbara Merz is white. Volunteer projects like theirs at the Alpha Sigma Alpha sorority are a new kind of necessary glue, educators and activists say.

With the help of civil rights law and university policies seeking more diversity, higher education is now pursued by those formerly kept out. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, American Indians, as well as the disabled and older students are taking their places in the classroom.

Once there, they also organize.

Like tiny nations, groups identified by race and heritage pursue their own interests, leading to campus fragmentation. But another kind of activism is gaining cachet on campus: extracurricular community service. This may be the way to reconnect the pieces of the shattered mosaic, some organizations say.

“What we see are signs of community activity on campuses, both among majority students and students of color,” said Susan Stroud, director of Campus Compact and the Center for Public Service.

Housed at Brown University in Rhode Island, Campus Compact is a national endeavor founded five years ago to promote volunteer activities as part of the college experience.

Stroud added: “There are some campuses that are making community service one of those ways that one bridges the differences at campuses.”

“Mixing it up” is the philosophy adopted by the Campus Outreach Community League in St. Paul, Minn. Run mostly by recent college graduates and affiliated with 600 campuses, the organization fosters the idea that altruism isn’t enough. When students arrange to build housing for the poor or tutor inner-city children, they must be sure to draw participants from assorted races and ethnic backgrounds.

Said the league’s executive director, Julia Scatliff:

“For organizations to remain predominantly white in an age that is predominantly diverse, it’s not effective anymore.

“Higher education needs to be shook up, because there are really pockets of isolation on campus and what we’re trying to do is offer pragmatic solutions,” Scatliff said in a recent interview.

It’s this notion of bringing people together that inspired Diana Lugo to form “culture clusters” last year at Cal Poly Pomona.

Students from various ethnic and racial backgrounds who did volunteer work met weekly during Lugo’s senior year to talk about their respective cultures. “That’s the only way we’re going to learn about each other,” said Lugo, a Mexican-American who now works at the California spinoff of Campus Compact.

In Louisiana, where a fledgling white student union movement stirs fears of old racism in a new disguise and schools are still identified by color, 150 white and black students from eight New Orleans campuses joined forces one day in April to spruce up a mission for the homeless.

That event was the work of Debra Thomas, New Orleans coordinator of the league and a recent graduate of Southern University at New Orleans.

Like many in this new effort to integrate volunteer activities, she said it’s too soon to know the long-term results.

“But one of the things that have happened, it has provided a forum in which students have a chance to change some of their old perceptions. And that’s a start.”