The bi-annual Pace Makes a Difference Day (PMDD) accomplished its highest attendance this year by motivating both students eager to serve the community and those who wanted to contribute to a campus tradition.
This year’s Fall Pace Makes a Difference Day managed to gather 300 students to contribute to the Westchester Community through a variety of on-campus and off-campus activities. On campus, groups were assigned to clean up the fitness trails and attempted to remove some of the muck in Choate Pond. Off campus, groups went as far as Portchester’s Sharing Shelf where clothes were repackaged for underprivileged families and teens.
Students who didn’t register ahead of time created colorful bears and wrote letters for children in Blythedale Children’s Hospital. These are only a few of the dozen or so activities that took place on Pace Makes a Difference Day.
Students had a variety of reasons for contributing to the day of community service.
“I wanted to do something that makes kids smile,” said sophomore biological psychology major Alyssa Jimenez. She helped create bears and wrote letters to children because of her fondness for kids. She contributed to last year’s PMDD by volunteering at The Loft, a LGBT community center that hopes to provide a sense of safety to those discriminated against for their sexual orientation. The Loft was another location for this year’s PMDD.
Other students wanted to get involved just to be included in Pace’s philanthropic efforts.
“Everyone else was doing it,” said senior environmental studies major Chistiaan Van Zyl, “I wanted to help beautify the campus.”
Van Zyl was a part of the group that attempted to clean Choate Pond. The task proved more difficult than expected but the group also pulled weeds and created a path near Goldstein Academic, which was visually beautified with mulch.
Some returning staff members thought this year’s PMDD was more positively received by participants. Area Director for Residential Life, Matthew Landau had a better experience this year than previous years.
“Everyone was great, everyone was active and engaged,” said Landau.
This year he was assigned to helping clean Opperman Pond. The group had roughly twenty-five participants, most of which were Residential Life staff, members of Alpha Chi Epsilon or various students who attended on their own. Last year, Landau was assigned to Pleasantville’s Horseshoe Competition, which only had five participants.
“I think what they do is great, having so many different sites allows Pace students to get out of the University and into the Westchester Community,” said Landau.
Staff hopes the off-campus activities will make new students feel more attached to the surrounding community.
This year’s PMDD was aimed at the University’s freshmen by being a part of the Passport program, which hopes to engage new students in campus activities and events. Roughly 30 percent of the students who attended PMDD were freshmen students.
PMDD is in its fourth year of existence and although it has made tremendous strides, there are still bigger plans in the future.
“If we get more community members working with us then we could take a lot more people,” said Associate Director for SDCA, Shawn Livingston.
Livingston noted that this year’s PMDD had a small increase of student attendance but gradual growth is more beneficial to the program that rapid expansion.
“If every freshmen class sent every freshmen, I’d be in big trouble because that’s over 600 students,” said Livingston, “there are not enough sites for that many people.”
Most of the program is organized in groups of small efforts and scattered around all of Westchester. This requires a lot of pre-planning and forces the University to plan for those who pre-registered within the month before the event takes place.
However, almost a third of the attendance of PMDD was walk-in students who did not register ahead of time. Livingston hopes to evolve the program into a more adaptable event that can account for a large amount of walk-ins. Most off-campus groups require transportation and planning but a larger event such as a walk or run could easily give 200 students a way to contribute without signing up in advance. Livingston also wants to increase the number of communities that PMDD affects.
“I’d love to see us expand our operation into Briarcliff, Chappaqua or Ossining,” said Livingston.
For now, the program hopes to continue its gradual increase of student attendance and Livingston hopes that students recognize the importance of PMDD.
“I think it’s great that we’re doing this. The mission of PMDD is to maintain or improve relationships with our community but also to have students understand and value community service and see why it’s important. We’d like to increase the number of volunteers and also enforce the mission of service,” said Livingston.
Pace Makes a Difference Day is bi-annual and will occur again next semester, Spring 2013.