Release Date: March 4, 2005

MONMOUTH, Ill. — This spring, while thousands of college students are making their annual migration to the beaches of Daytona for a week of revelry, a group of 17 Monmouth College students is taking a more northerly route – with a much higher purpose in mind.

Accompanied by chaperones Stephanie Fritz and Kenny Blair of the student affairs office, the students loaded into vans Friday afternoon for an annual Monmouth College ritual known as the Alternative Spring Break. Their destination is Brunswick County, N.C., where they will spend a week performing community improvement projects under the supervision of a local Baptist church.

Now in its tenth year, the Alternative Spring Break is a student-run enterprise that in the past has visited such diverse locales as a South Dakota Indian reservation, an Appalachian village and an Arkansas town. So how was North Carolina selected for this year’s project?

“After doing some searching online, I stumbled across a link for volunteering in Brunswick County,” explained Emily Bouchard, a senior public relations major who is one of the student organizers of the trip. “I emailed the link and a woman by the name of Jayne Matthews replied, explaining how she could help plan our trip. I gave her the basic details and she worked around our needs.”

Bouchard said that Matthews contacted a number of volunteer organizations in the area to arrange projects and also found a host church, where they will stay in a dorm-like room and have access to gym facilities.

Participants have been planning for the trip since last fall, raising money through the sale of Christmas ornaments, calendars and discount shopping cards, and bagging groceries for tips. Meals for the journey have been donated by the college’s food service, while the hosting organizations will feed the group during its stay.

And it should be a hungry group. The week’s itinerary includes landscaping for the church and homes of elderly parishioners, working at a Habitat for Humanity house, doing outdoor work and clean-up for a parks and recreation agency, and posing as victims in a disaster drill.

NEWS AT MC

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