700 participate in 7th annual President’s Day of Service

During the seventh annual President’s Day of Service (PDOS), nearly 700 students, faculty and alumni volunteers participated in 30 different community service projects across Baltimore on Saturday.

Established when University President Ronald J. Daniels took office in 2009, PDOS is a University-wide event made to facilitate service projects at non-profit organizations and community centers. By partnering local projects with Hopkins volunteers, this one-day event strives to thank local organizations for their work in Baltimore. The Center for Social Concern (CSC) receives funding from the Hopkins Parents Fund to organize the day.

The event, which usually takes place in the fall, was postponed this year because of bad weather and occurred in the spring for the first time, despite bad weather on the rescheduled date.

During his speech on Wyman Quad to kickoff the day, Daniels joked about the weather.

“I’ve looked at an app on my phone, and the good news is there are no thunderstorms, there is no rain, but there is a 100 percent chance of drizzle for the next four hours, but drizzle does not stop Johns Hopkins,” he said.

Service projects for PDOS are categorized into three groups: Beautification, Hunger and Food Justice, and Working with People.

Beautification initiatives this year involved activities such as mural painting and invasive species removal. Hunger and Food Justice projects included work at community gardens and farms. Mentoring local children was the focus of the Working with People initiative.

Acting as a team leader for a group from Alpha Phi sorority, freshman Katie Gauch led students to volunteer at Boone Street Farm, which is located in the East Baltimore Midway neighborhood and supplies local farmers markets.

“We were split up into three groups: One worked on composting and rebuilding a structure, one group worked on weeding and putting wood chips down to create a walking area around the garden and the last worked on cleaning up some of the trash in the area and planting,” she said. “My group personally was paired with the head of the farm, and we learned a lot about their process and how everything works.”

Gauch thought that the volunteering efforts proved a success and that students should not pass up opportunities like PDOS to help their community.

Another team leader, sophomore Karl Johnson of the Hopkins Christian Fellowship (HCF), supervised a group that went to stain a front porch at an assisted living home operated by Volunteers for America.

Johnson served alongside his friends and he looks forward to participating again in the future, but he also thought that the event could be improved by making the service projects longer and perhaps an all-day event as the name suggests.

“While [PDOS] is a great platform through which students can lend a morning of their weekend to the community, I ultimately hope it’s merely a first step for these same students to want to serve their community in more long term functions,” he wrote in an email to The News-Letter.

Planning on continuing PDOS in the future, Daniels emphasized that student involvement in the city is a critical part of the University’s commitment to the Baltimore community.

“[Volunteering with local nonprofits] is the single best way we tell the story to Baltimore about the centrality of our commitment,” Daniels said. “You make it concrete. You make it real. You make it credible. And for that, we are really thankful.”