Pomona College Students Visit Collective Roots Second Year in a Row, Taking an "Alternabreak"

Students from Pomona College in Southern California get off campus and into the community with this alternative to traditional spring break. On Monday, March 19th, 2008, 15 students visited Collective Roots and worked the whole day in the flagship school garden located at East Palo Alto Charter School. (photo to right shows Pomona College Students in 2007, remaining photos feature 2008 Students)

For the second year running, its community service-based Alternative Spring Break program, aka “Alternabreak,” takes students to different parts of California—this time, with more funding, more trips and more students. Collective Roots is fortunate to be a beneficiary of this innovative program.

The program serves as an opportunity for those with limited spring break options to get off campus and into the community, focusing on social justice issues.

Aside from providing an alternative spring break option, the program’s other goal is to build sustained relationships with various community-based organizations. “We really want to get to a point where we identify some organizations that we can partner with and continue to work with in successive years,” says Maria Tucker, director of the Volunteer Center, “sort of extending the Pomona community beyond Pomona.”

Community Through Volunteering

All of the trips, funding and transportation are organized by student coordinators at the Volunteer Center. When the coordinators got together to discuss the goals of the trips this year, they looked for organizations that they could work with on a consistent basis. They recognized the politics of doing community work and how it could be a burden for organizations to have volunteer support for only a short term.

“We [thought a lot] about what we wanted to get out of doing work with a community program and how we’ll foster a type of continual relationship,” says Charisse Wu ’08, one of the Alternabreak coordinators. “If it wasn’t going to be a continual relationship, we thought about how we can communicate honestly [with organizations] so that they know we’re here and what we can do.”

Sustaining Community

Whether it’s the connections built with organizations or those built with alumni, it seems that everyone is working towards the idea of sustainable relations. “This is in line with the College’s strategic plan in moving forward and developing additional substantive relationships with…our community, whether they are local or even distant,” Tucker says. Alternabreak serves as a way to help students bridge the gap between school and the outside world.