To increase student participation in these and other such activities, I have developed a comprehensive plan to advertise to and recruit individuals interested in specific types of volunteerism. We begin the year by getting them to fill out data forms. This year we created a database for this activity. Over the summer we will check the accuracy of the database we developed with our IT people to make this pilot program work effortlessly. It is our hope that this database will enable us to identify individual’s desired categories by a click of a button. We will also use our e-mail database that was developed this year to earmark those not graduating and send them e-mail blasts highlighting activities and types of activities they volunteered for this year, in hopes that they are available for like activities next year.
The community that we will target, very carefully because of our tight security, will be those individuals that participate in our senior and pre-school mentoring programs, Girl Scout troop#360, Bailey House (servicing families w/ HIV, The League of Women Voters and all other agencies that participate in our Fall 2004 Volunteer Expo.

There are several activities each year that are specifically designed to make and receive valuable contributions to and from our community. Through the SVCS program in the Department of Student Life under the auspices of the Division of Student Affairs, we begin our year with community involvement. During orientation we sponsor 2 events where by our students have the opportunity to serve as mentors with preschool aged children by way of a daylong schedule of programmed activities. These activities include arts & crafts, interactive games, caricatures and a lunch designed to foster one on one conversation between all participants. This year we invited the Loving Care Center pre-school program to our campus for this activity. This proved to be successful. We had 25 children and 50 FIT students that participated. The FIT students stated that the experience was rewarding. They exercised patience in dealing with children of that age w/short attention spans.
Our students also were instructed all that went into programming such an activity. I explained to them that the large number to planned activity breakout areas were due to the fact that children of this age have very short attention spans and need not be idle. This would enable everyone to have an enjoyable experience. We learned the when reserving our facilities (the 8th floor) we must reserve all break out rooms as well as the common space. The noise level was fine for participants however if there were any other scheduled activities in the floor, they would have been disrupted.
To be able to increase participation of the younger children next year, I must have a set number of volunteers signed up before the new students arrive for orientation. I am going to have student sign up for the activities that participated this year so as to have enough children to mentor. We never know how many FIT students will participate, inviting sophomores will enable to me to properly plan for larger group in advance.
On our second date of orientation we invited seniors from the Penn South Complex. Our students were invited to bring photos to facilitate open discussion of their families. The seniors brought in their photos as well. This activity has not only helped in creating open dialog between the two groups they also serve as additional pieces for the arts & crafts segment of the day. We had a manicurist and make-up artist come and give the seniors makeovers with the help of our students. After the makeover was complete we had a caricaturist draw all participants (students and seniors). This provided a wealth of material to stimulate conversation during the luncheon that followed. All participants have voiced desire to participate if this program were offered several times a year!