The Mortar Board Senior Honor Society at UCLA will sponsor academic and community service events this week to celebrate the organization’s 91st anniversary.
Campus chapters across the country are hosting Mortar Board Week events to increase interest in the group and highlight this focus on community service.
Several of the events taking place at UCLA are centered around the L.A. community.
The society is a nationwide group that recognizes seniors who have excelled in the areas of scholarship, leadership and service, said Edesha Basa, president of the honor group at UCLA.
Whereas some honor societies focus on recognition of academic achievement, the Mortar Board Honor Society stresses active community involvement in addition to academics and leadership, she added.
The group is relatively small, with around 40 members so that each member has an established position in the club and is actively invested in the chapter’s projects.
Sarah Matthews, one of the group’s community service chairs, said that students are privileged to study at UCLA and that it is important for them to use their particular “skills and motivation” to reach less fortunate members of their community.
One way the group plans to do this during this week’s activities is through a backpack drive held in association with the organization Ecogener, which specializes in providing backpacks to elementary school students who could not otherwise afford them, Matthews said.
Members of the honor society will collect new and gently used backpacks on campus, which Ecogener will then decorate and distribute.
Matthews said that the backpack drive was a way to reach out to underprivileged children in a way that people don’t normally think about.
Matthews is also involved in the planning of the group’s canned food drive, another Mortar Board Week event.
During the food drive, members of the society will set up boxes in Kerckhoff Hall and the Student Activities Center to collect canned foods to donate to the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank, Matthews added.
She said the idea for the food drive came from one of the honor society’s members, who volunteered for the food bank and commented in one of the group’s meetings about the constant need for food to donate in the L.A. area.
Both the backpack and canned food drives began Tuesday and will continue through Friday.
A third community service project taking place during the week-long event is a fund raiser for Operation Mend, a project organized by the UCLA Medical Center to raise money to pay for reconstructive surgeries needed by those injured in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Basa said.
The fundraiser will be held in cooperation with Jamba Juice, which will donate a portion of the proceeds earned on Thursday afternoon to Operation Mend.
“This is the easiest and best way that we can help these veterans,” Matthews said of the project.
In addition to the week’s charity events, the group will participate in this Thursday’s second annual academic honor fair in Kerckhoff Hall, Basa said.
At the fair, representatives from a number of the campus’s honor societies gather to inform students about academic and scholarship opportunities available on campus.
Basa said that the event will also feature an alumni table, where past students will explain their experiences with the Mortar Board Senior Honor Society as well as describe their current work.
Amanda Weldy, one of the group’s scholarship chairs, called the academic fair “a one-stop honor shop,” saying that the event would help raise interest in the club.
The fair will give group members the opportunity to speak to students about projects undertaken by the Mortar Board society throughout the year. These projects include reading to elementary school students through Reading to Kids and helping to build affordable housing for those in need through Habitat for Humanity, Basa said.
The events of Mortar Board Week, along with the year-round projects put on by the honor society, go along with the group’s belief that academic achievement should come hand in hand with active community involvement and leadership.
“Everything I’ve done with the Mortar Board Society will make me a better member of the community in general,” Weldy said.