Over Spring Break, the Chaplain’s Office and the Center for Community and Civic Engagement are leading two student trips focused on civil rights action and outreach. Both of these scheduled trips will be taking place in Atlanta, GA and place a focus on the experiences of minorities in the American South.
Rev. Amy Shorner-Johnson will be leading the Civil Rights and Interfaith trip to Atlanta, GA for what is now the fourth year.
“The trip includes visits to the Martin Luther King Jr. historic site, as well as the civil rights and human rights museum of Atlanta. We also go to the Jackson foundation and home in Selma as well as visit with members of the temple in Selma,” Shorner-Johnson said.
This trip effectively blends its focus on religious affairs and on civil rights initiatives, both current and historical. Shorner-Johnson stated that the nature of this trip has changed due to the ways she and her students have gotten more involved with the community.
This year’s service project will entail students serving a meal in Montgomery as well as helping move music into a Selma museum. Keeping with the religious focus of the Interfaith trip, Shorner-Johnson and students will also have “conversations with people who are engaging their religious tradition and modern-day civil rights and racial issues both at Park Ave., Baptist Church in Atlanta, and we have a discussion with an Islamic leader doing similar things, also in Atlanta.”
Students who choose to participate in this trip will have the benefit of gaining a diverse set of experiences and perspectives.
Likewise, Community Director for the Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE) Sharon Sherick will be getting Elizabethtown College students involved in Atlanta, GA. Where the Civil Rights and Interfaith Trip focuses on religion and the continued impact of the American Civil Rights movement—this trip will focus instead on “working with the IRC (International Rescue Committee) while learning about the work they do to address key issues facing refugees and immigrants in their community,” Sherick said.
The IRC is an organization that “responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover, and gain control of their future.”
The student group participating in this trip will be assisting with this kind of volunteer work so as to assist immigrant populations in Georgia.
Sherick emphasized “our service trips and projects are always carried out in partnership with others who are experts in their own communities, and we are particularly committed to working with organizations that emphasize the dignity of all people.”
When Sherick asked what students had to say about service trips offered through the school, one anonymous student said that “It is so worth the experience.” The student leader for the trip, fifth-year Sage Garvey expressed that as a fifth year student she was “so close to going out into the real world” so she valued experiences such as the ones offered by the CCCE.
She also mentioned how “last summer [she] did fieldwork at an emergency homeless shelter and was able to work with a few refugees and really enjoyed it.”
In working with refugee and immigrant populations again, she hopes to “enhance [her] skills and learn all that [she] can so that [she] can serve [her] future clients as best as possible” as an Occupational Therapist.
Overall, regarding this trip, Garvey is “excited to work alongside other students who are also passionate about community service and helping those in need.”
In keeping with the college’s commitment to Educate for Service, its faculty and students remain ever-engaged with volunteerism and outreach.
