Appalachia spends spring break in service

It is 6 p.m. on Sunday and there is an exodus across campus. Duke is just beginning to pick apart the Boston College defense in Durham, N.C., but still they come. Music, singing, and clapping pour out of the Eagle's Nest. Trip leaders form a tunnel to welcome participants into the crowded room. Over 500 people will attend tonight's meeting, far exceeding the 323-person capacity of the Eagle's Nest. This is a meeting of the Appalachia Volunteers, a gathering of the campus' largest student organization.

Since October, this group has been meeting weekly to hear speakers, watch films, and reflect upon their impending trips to obtain at least a rudimentary understanding of the places they will be visitng. This is a part of the Appalachia mission: to learn about the realities of poverty in the United States, discuss the injustices of entrenched poverty, and consider the relationship between faith and social justice throughout the year.

The exodus across campus prefigures a larger exodus starting this Saturday, when approximately 600 students will staff the 36 Appalachia placements in disparate places from Wilmington, Del., to New Orleans, La.

The program's journey from 12 volunteers in 1978 to the enormous organization it is today has not been without its growing pains, however. It has faced criticism for everything from the motives of the participants, to its price, to the campus social scene surrounding the trips.

In talking with administrators and participants of the program, it became clear that the program has many of the advantages and defects that one would expect from a large organization.

"I think it can be very hard to have a really great educational experience, no matter how great our speakers may be, crammed into a room with that many people," said Tammy Liddell, Appalachia's faculty adviser. "The willingness of the participants makes it work - they are willing to accept this fate and accept the realities of it by listening and participating while keeping things mostly orderly."

Problems aside, the reach of the program is enormous. Dispersing a multitude of students across the eastern United States, the Appalachia Volunteers have a profound ability to both touch lives in a variety of settings and the opportunity to experience entrenched social and political problems, from urban poverty in Cleveland, Ohio, to disaster relief in Pass Christian, Miss.

All this traveling doesn't come cheap. According to the Rev. Jim Erps, S.J., the director of Campus Ministry, the budget budget of the program hovers around $320,000, most of which is raised by the students.

Despite the high cost of the trips, Erps defends the expenditure on the basis of the long-range return.

"We recognize some of our graduates bility when they go out into the world," Erps said. "As BC graduates, for them to have a firsthand experience of poverty, that is an extremely valuable part of their experience. That wouldn't be accomplished by simply cutting a check [to these places]."

As a predominantly underclassman organization, Appalachia can serve as an early introduction to the culture of service at BC.

Immersed in a Culture of Service Rev. Jim Fleming, S.J., the assistant to the Vice President for University Mission and Ministry, has researched service organizations for his doctorate in policy analysis and contends that a vibrant culture of service exists at BC.

"In 2001 on the freshman survey, 50 percent of the students coming into college said [they intended] to do community service. By the time they graduated, 76 percent said they had done community service. That's an unexpected increase of 26 percent, a quarter of the class!" said Fleming. "One quarter of the entire student body didn't think they were going to do something, then came here and did it. What got a quarter of the entire class to change its mind? That is what I call this culture of service.

"Besides courses, the next most common experience at Boston College is volunteering. You know what the third one is? The Plex: intramurals or club sports."

As the largest service organization on campus, Appalachia is intimately tied to this culture of service. With no application process, the organization is open to absolutely anybody willing to make the commitment to attend the weekly Sunday meetings. This provides a large group of students the opportunity to come to a greater awareness of social problems.

What is particularly important, said Jenn Arens, the Appalachia community outreach coordinator and A&S '07, is the program's ability to take people with different levels of social awareness and provide them with both exposure to information about the issues and a shared experience of service.

"When you have a lot of people on campus who have had these experiences and know a lot more than you do [about social justice], it can be very intimidating. You might be like, 'Oookay, I'm not one of those social justice people, that's not my scene because I don't know about this,'" said Arens. "There is enough flexibility in Appalachia for people to learn. Campus is too easily split up into the people who know and who care about things and the people who don't. That division is really negative because we should all be trying to foster a positive and personal learning experience for everybody. You have to try to reach the most people possible and encourage people to experience things on their own but not in a way they are going to be thought of as stupid or unfeeling."