Groups plan to centralize volunteerism at Pitt

In an effort to promote volunteerism and community outreach at Pitt, the University has formed a new committee and an affiliated student organization. 

This committee, known as the Pitt Serves Committee, represents the culmination of more than a year’s work by several members of the University administration and will host the Student Civic Engagement Committee, its student arm. Although whether or not these two initiatives will create a campus environment more amenable to volunteerism is uncertain.

“The Office of Pitt Serves cannot simply plan service projects, it must be the catalyst for a much-needed cultural shift at the University of Pittsburgh,” said Pitt senior and SCEC Executive Director Wasi Mohamed, who is also a part of the Pitt Serves Committee.

SCEC, which hopes to play a large role in volunteerism and community outreach at Pitt in the future, is a subset of the larger Pitt Serves Committee and will fall under the Office of Student Affairs. SCEC hopes to serve as a resource for students and student organizations looking for volunteer opportunities or support for their projects.

It will also sponsor and organize large-scale service projects both on campus and around Pittsburgh and receive Student Volunteer Outreach’s formula-group funding from the Student Activities Fund.

These new initiatives, however, do not come without skepticism.

“I think that the administration, Student Affairs, is trying to have too much of an influence on how students volunteer,” said Pitt senior Mary Mallampalli, who previously served as chairwoman of Student Government Board’s Community Outreach Committee and as an early member of the Pitt Serves Committee.

She said that volunteering is a very personal experience for students and that subjective participation draws students to philanthropic causes of particular interest to them. That experience then stays with them for the rest of their lives.

“But when Student Affairs takes advantage of having 17,000 able-bodied young people … it defeats the purpose of volunteerism,” she said.

Mallampalli expressed concern that SCEC and Pitt Serves could streamline the process to the point of depriving volunteerism of its true purpose, thus creating an environment in which students are encouraged to engage in community outreach for the sake of resumé-building or other artificial motivators not based in philanthropic aims.

“The University shouldn’t be manufacturing anything,” she said.

But those who are part of the Pitt Serves Committee and SCEC are very confident in the initiatives’ potential to change Pitt’s culture of volunteerism for the better.

Formation

Pitt Serves, according to Vice Provost and Dean of Students Kathy Humphrey, came into existence a little more than a year ago when the Office of the Provost asked the undergraduate deans to come together and examine the undergraduate experience in a holistic way to re-evaluate the total experience.

“Out of that meeting with the undergraduate deans … many things came forward as things that would be good to enhance,” said Humphrey. “One concept was the notion of how we provide service to the community and to the region.”

This meeting kindled a desire for campuswide service that takes a more concrete and centralized form and led to the creation of Pitt Serves, which is a subcommittee composed of faculty, students and staff.

In addition to Humphrey, members of the Pitt Serves Committee include administrators from Student Volunteer Outreach, the Office of Community and Governmental Relations, the Community Outreach Partnership Center, the University Honors College, the School of Nursing, the Office of Cross Cultural and Leadership Development, the School of Pharmacy and the School of Social Work, among others. Mohamed is currently the only student on the Pitt Serves Committee.

“We all came together to talk about, how do we enhance student service on our campus?” Humphrey said. “And we took this notion of Pitt Serves and said, ‘If we are going to enhance undergraduate student service, what do we need to do to create, enhance and take [service] to another level?”

The committee outlined a number of goals, including Pitt eventually appearing on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll and the Princeton Review’s list of top schools for service. It also invested in software programs that track and account for the overall economic impact on the region made possible thanks to student service and pointed to other institutions that the committee considers to be national models.

“These universities approach civic engagement with the same care as they would their academic research,” Mohamed said.

The committee’s exploratory sampling took it not only to the University of Pennsylvania, but also Indiana University, Purdue University and others.

“We took a very academic approach to benchmarking and researching who’s good at what they do,” said Tracy Soska, the co-director and co-principal investigator of the University’s Community Outreach Partnership Center and the University’s Continuing Education Program.

SGB President Gordon Louderback went with other Board members on a trip in February to Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, to learn how other colleges approach student leadership and governance. He said an increased, Universitywide expansion of amenities for volunteerism such as this would be of benefit to Pitt students.

“You realize that other schools do have solidified offices for service and a more solidified presence on campus,” Louderback said. “I think that we do a great job, but with the amount of students we have, we could do better. And with this initiative, we could do better and give back to our community a lot.”

But Mallampalli disagrees.

Incentivizing volunteerism

She said she considers SCEC to be a “pseudo-student organization.” She feels that Student Affairs is plucking out students to take part in projects by offering them too many incentives.

“If people want to volunteer, they’ll volunteer. It’s a personal thing, but we shouldn’t necessarily be incentivizing people by saying, ‘Oh, come here and have some pizza, a free T-shirt and some OCC credit,” she said.

SCEC Co-Executive Director Mona Kazour confirmed that volunteer project participants will receive OCC credit as well food and transportation. She also said she was certain some form of T-shirt will also be given out.

Kazour disagreed that OCC credit, food, transportation and a free shirt constitute “incentivizing” the projects as a means of drawing in participants. She said she has a different idea of what it means to incentivize a project.

“I don’t feel like volunteering should need an incentive,” Kazour said. “I’m not going to pay you to do service.”

Although Kazour said she won’t pay students, all of the SCEC committee chairs received a stipend to help alleviate the cost of housing, as they were mandated to spend their summer at Pitt working on the program to prepare it for its debut.

This stipend was designed to help the chairs pay for their rent as they worked on their respective committees and on the volunteer group as a whole. According to Mohamed, however, that stipend was not enough to cover most of the directors’ rent.

Mallampalli feels that Pitt Serves and SCEC represent a shift in the goals and aims of Student Affairs, from which SCEC will be based.

“I think Student Affairs’ values have really changed over the past year from ‘Let’s do what’s best for students’ to ‘Let’s do what makes Pitt look the best.’”

Pitt Serves — and by extension, SCEC — looked to create an entity that would work with all service-related student organizations on campus to help them as they work on their projects and to act as a liaison between organizations. It also aims at being a means for these organizations to better communicate with Student Affairs.

Although SCEC’s mission is similar to that of Student Volunteer Outreach in many respects, the former organization will absorb the latter.

The money from the Student Activities Fund that goes toward Student Volunteer Outreach activities such as Pitt Project Oakland, Alternative Spring Break and the Martin Luther King Day of Service, will continue to fund them. However, they will operate out of an SCEC office.

“SVO will continue to have a direct and immediate impact on students,” said Director of Student Life and Associate Dean of Students Kenyon Bonner. “SCEC will be another component of that.”

Bonner said that while SCEC won’t serve as the centralized unit of the formerly SVO-based projects, the Student Activities Fund money previously denoted as formula-group funds for SVO will continue pay for its initiatives.

He also said the committee wants to obtain an endowment in the future to finance its goals, which include being able to supply “alternative” or “mini” grants, which will allow service entities to come to the operation and apply for funding to help them with their projects.

Bonner said that if Pitt Serves becomes endowed, use of Student Volunteer Outreach’s formula-group funds to finance some of SCEC’s operations will be reconsidered. But, he says, “until we get to that point, it will continue to support what it supports.”

An anonymous donor has been financing Pitt Serves and its pilot programs, but the groups hope to draw in an endowment that can give them more flexibility to carry out their mission in the future. And according to Soska, all of the schools benchmarked have centers named for their endowments. 

“I believe we are making the kind of impact that someone will want to endow this center,” said Bonner. “I’m hoping, I’m praying that someone will come through for us and endow the work that our students are doing.”

When asked if there was any foreseeable reason in her opinion as to why SCEC’s budget wouldn’t be shared or made public once it was later finalized, Kazour responded, “Oh, not at all.”

Future

The freshman orientation service projects that were completed Aug. 23 were done in conjunction with SCEC. But until the group can boast a more solidified track record and well-known presence on campus, some students’ reactions remain mixed.

“It is PR,” Mallampalli said. “And I think that 90 percent of what Student Affairs does is PR with activities like this.”

SGB member Sowmya Sanapala said that whether or not SCEC will be a useful asset to student organizations “remains to be seen, to be honest.”

She is interested to see how the relationship will take shape because of the overlap between already existing volunteer groups. It will streamline the way students interact with volunteering, she thinks, and the way SGB works with that, as well.

In order to increase its own efficiency, SCEC is divided into six committees with a different Pitt student serving as the head of each.

Sara Klein will serve as the director of fundraising, Natalie Rothenberger as the director of public and internal relations, Bennett Garner as the director of education service projects, Niaz Khan as the director of health and wellness service projects, Shivani Patel as the director of community-based service projects and Michael Beckman as the director of environmental service projects.

Each of these positions will run a committee that allows interested students to be involved in the Pitt Serves process.

“However, while I was creating the committee structure, I realized that there was no single, uniform model that could work efficiently for each and every committee individually,” said Mohamed.

Instead, each committee will be structured differently.

Currently, those involved with the project are uncertain whether SCEC committee chairs will receive any sort of stipend or compensation for their work beyond the housing stipend they already received.

Humphrey stated that Pitt Serves will make a program coordinator available to student organizations that help to provide resources, and SCEC will work with that program coordinator as a support system for said student organization. She said this setup is one the University doesn’t currently have. 

Sanapala said she thinks the SCEC could help groups with similar goals work together effectively. But she also said it’s possible that SCEC will risk hurting smaller groups because of the potential for redundancy in terms of projects.

To prevent this redundancy, she said, SCEC should support smaller student organizations that are working on their own service projects and allow them to succeed. 

Mallampalli also expressed skepticism about SCEC’s potential effectiveness.

“It basically sounds like Student Affairs is trying to reinvent the wheel when we have a wheel that’s already rolling pretty well.”

Staff writer Mahita Gajanan contributed to this report.