Monday, March 2, 1998
Students sought for service
ACTIVISM: With school, work, many don’t have time to help
community
By Starr Keilman
Daily Bruin Contributor
Community service is a delicate matter, between coordinating
groups, being sensitive to diverse cultures and racial groups, and
getting students to participate when they are facing multiple
demands on their time.
To address these issues, the second UCLA Community Service
Conference taught organizers and interested students how to solve
some of these problems.
Community service embraces many different areas, as Saturday’s
conference showed. At UCLA, students have a wide variety of options
for service. The Community Service Commission (CSC) alone is the
home of 22 different organizations, including the Bruin Partners,
which tutors at elementary schools, the Prison Coalition, and Women
and Youth Supporting Each Other, which tutors middle and high
school girls.
The conference, presented by a collaboration of eight UCLA
groups, sought to acknowledge this diversity with a wide range of
topics and speakers.
Sen. Tom Hayden opened the conference with a keynote address on
the importance of community service at the university level.
Sporting a prayer shawl from the Dalai Lama, Hayden said that
universities have an obligation as public institutions to move
community service from a marginal stance back into the
mainstream.
Hayden offered that community service is a part of being a human
being, asking, "If you’re not engaged in service, what are you
engaged in?"
Hayden presented a workshop on Community Service Legislation, a
current project of the senator. Since students often are forced to
choose among classes, work and community service, service often
gets left behind. Hayden’s legislation aims to make community
service a more feasible option, by lowering the tuition of those
involved in service work.
Another workshop focused on the nuances of race and culture in
doing service work.
Many service providers do not realize that they are coming from
one perspective, and sometimes fail to respect other cultures, said
the speakers at "Multicultural Issues in Community Service."
Service organizations should be aware of their own perspectives,
and be careful not to force their culture on others, said speakers
Pam Cysner, advisor for the UCLA Center for Student Programming,
and youth organizer Lloyd Wilkey.
Antonio Sandoval, a second-year political science and history
student involved with the Community Programs Office, said he hoped
to get a lot more volunteers out of the conference. However, Ilana
Gotz, a fourth-year communication studies student who attended the
conference, said she doesn’t think this will be the case.
Although Gotz said that she really enjoyed the conference and
found it to be really informative, "the people who don’t do
community service weren’t here," she said.
The conference, in its second year, expanded its attempt to
reach volunteers and prospective recruits. Invitations to the
conference were given not only to UCLA students, but to other
universities and service organizations. This year’s conference also
offered a wider variety of topics and more speakers.
Joe Balais, part of the CSC and an organizer of the conference,
estimates attendance of last year’s conference between 50 and 60
people. With increased work and exposure, Balais expected this
year’s attendance to be between 200 to 300 people. However, actual
turn-out was only about 122, including the 35 speakers. Many of
those who pre-registered for the conference did not attend, and the
number of walk-ins was lower than anticipated.
Organizers seemed pleased with the outcome. Sandoval hopes
students can come away from the conference with "a sense of
empowerment and the realization that community service is not one
narrow thing."
The day concluded with a closing speech by James Washington,
UCLA alumnus and former Dallas Cowboy. Washington summed up the
day: "We as people make time for what we want to do." As his wife
used to tell him, "The best gift you can give someone is your own
time."