Students give back in service

More than 400 Northeastern students passed on the chance to sleep late Saturday morning and participated in Northeastern’s 15th Annual Fall Service Day, said Sarah Hamilton, assistant director and program coordinator at the Center of Community Service.
This year’s 14th annual fall NU Service day, run by the Center of Community Service, had more than 22 Boston-area non-profit organizations participate and featured several neighborhood and park cleanups, Hamilton said.
Throughout the day, students worked with different organizations such as Multicultural Youth Tour of What’s Now (mytown) organization, helped clean and organize the Mission Hill K-8 School, helped prepare literary projects for the JumpStart program, and picked up trash in the Kevin Fitzgerald Park in Mission Hill and The Symphony Road Garden in the Fenway area, Hamilton said.
Heather Flaherty, a middler neruoscience major, said she volunteered as a team leader for an organization called mytown, a nonprofit that trains and employs high school students to give historical walking tours and presentations in the South End, Lower Roxbury and the Fenway, seeking to empower these students with strong leadership skills.
Flaherty’s team consisted of members of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, she said.
“At the mytown organization building, my team painted three rooms and organized and cleaned the kitchen and office area,” Flaherty said. “It’s great, when you work with a group, you notice the work goes by really fast.”
Flaherty said her team surpassed her expectations for the day.
“Everything [mytown] planned for us to do was finished by 3 p.m.,” she said. “We would have done more if they had any other work, but I hope they will participate again next year.”
Flaherty first got involved in the Center of Community Service after going on an alternative spring break trip to Texas her freshman year and has also continued to stay involved in the center, she said.
Joseph Bordieri, a junior human services major, also volunteered as a team leader to clean up Mission Hill, he said.
“After meeting in Matthews Arena, my group walked over to the Kevin Fitzgerald Park area on Mission Hill with trash bags, gloves, brooms, and what we did was pick up trash off the streets and bushes, and sweep the streets,” Bordieri said. “We had about 10 huge bags filled with trash after just working on that street.”
The Kevin Fitzgerald Park is located a block up the hill from Brigham Circle.
The Mission Hill cleanup team consisted of 22 students, working for four hours straight to get rid of trash in the area, Bordieri said.
Bordieri became involved with the Center of Community Service while working as a co-op there last year, and said he has stayed active in the organization.
A third team of 12 undergraduate and graduate students cleaned and landscaped the Symphony Road Community Garden, said Rebecca Pfeffer, a first year graduate student in the Criminal Justice program.
The group picked up trash around and in the garden plots, and removed dirt, sediment and weeds from the pathways between the plots, Pfeffer said.
“Some of the people who have plots in the garden came by to see our progress,” Pfeffer said. “At first [the garden] didn’t seem like it needed much work, but after spending two and a half hours there you could definitely see a difference, and the plot owners were so thankful and happy we had been there.”
 Hamilton said the day was a huge success.
“[The Center of Community Service] was excited to see 400 students come out on a cold morning,” Hamilton said. “After talking the nonprofit organizations that students helped, they all seemed to be really impressed with how much work the students got done, and were very grateful for the help.”