Robin Harvey ’07 helps clear a trail at the Rancho del Chaparral Girl Scout Camp in Cuba, N.M., as a first-year student in 2003.

Photo by Mike Johnson ’05

For more than 12 years, the Center for Service and Learning and the student organization BreakOut have taken advantage of the Block Plan to organize community service trips for students, faculty, and staff during block and spring breaks.

BreakOut participants travel together to communities throughout the country, where they contribute to one or more projects in progress. BreakOut Steering Committee and student leaders plan and organize about 20 trips per year with the guidance of Center staff.

The continued success of BreakOut helped inspire a four-day service experience integrated into New Student Orientation: the Priddy Experience. (Read more about this experience in the adjacent article by Haruno Sengoku ’05.) Led by upper-class student leaders, two-thirds of the incoming class travels into the near Southwest to perform community service at over 30 sites that work with service-related issues such as homelessness, organic farming, sustainable living, and trail maintenance. Last year, more than 7,000 hours of service were performed by CC students in two days — the equivalent of one person working eight hours a day for 875 days!

Elizabeth Pudder is New Student Orientation coordinator and manager of the Center for Service and Learning.