News

JWU Serves Fosters Pride and Community Spirit

Andrea Feldman
05 May 2023

JWU Serves volunteers organizing materials for donations. Coinciding with Earth Day this year, JWU’s Providence Campus came out in full force for the inaugural JWU Serves. More than 150 student, faculty, and staff volunteers planted trees, cleaned up parks and coastal greenways, volunteered for shelter pets, and spruced up more than 10 different sites for a total of 300 service hours.

The event was initially planned as part of Greek Week for fraternity and sorority students, but interest quickly grew enough to necessitate opening it up to the larger JWU community. Lizz Zmarlicki, associate director of Student Engagement, and Matt Fannon, director of sustainability and resource management, worked with their teams to ensure a smooth day. It took a lot of planning and organizing, from getting clearances to making sure each volunteer was properly outfitted with the tools to do their chosen job — paint brushes, grabbers, shovels, gloves, etc.

“It was great to see so many students, staff and faculty come together with a common goal of working with our surrounding community.”

JWU Serves volunteers organizing the raw materials for making dog toys. Most, but not all, of the volunteer sites were centered around the Washington Park neighborhood where JWU’s Harborside Campus is situated. These included:

Providence Animal Rescue League (PARL): on-campus and onsite opportunities to make pet toys and beautify the shelter environment
Washington Park: cleanup and tree planting
Urban Coastal Greenway: waste pick-up on and around the coastline that runs from Save the Bay’s headquarters to Harborside
Plant-A-Tree: help Facilities plant trees on campus

For Fannon, the robust turnout — not to mention the near-perfect mild and sunny weather — set up JWU Serves for success: “It was great to see so many students, staff and faculty come together with a common goal of working with our surrounding community,” he noted. “There was some great work done at each location. People were enjoying the projects they were working on and each of the service locations we partnered with were so happy to work with our JWU community members.”

Making dog toys at the Wildcat Center. Since the event changed scope so quickly, additional locations and tasks needed to be added in short order, explained Zmarlicki: “Matt [Fannon] and I worked quickly to add as many new opportunities as we could to accommodate the large numbers and were very pleased with the outcome and participation from our community partners, faculty, staff and students.”

“We were very pleased with participation from our community partners, faculty, staff and students.”

Given the massive success of the day, plans are afoot to make JWU Serves a regular occurrence, with service days being planned for the spring and the fall. Building community and camaraderie while strengthening our connections to our chosen city is a great way to foster JWU pride — here’s to another JWU tradition!

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