Volunteer programs forge personal connections

FILE PHOTO SOUP'S ON: Serving the homeless in soup kitchens is one way Yalies establish a relationship with the New Haven community.

"Yale is perceived as a kind of cold place. People who are not doing that well see Yale as a rich playground that doesn't care about them," said Margie Klein, DC '01, co-coordinator of the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project (YHHAP).

Nevertheless, according to Anika Singh, BR '01, co-coordinator of the Dwight Hall Undergaduate Executive Committee, Yale students are working hard every day to strengthen the human connections between Yale and New Haven. Singh said there are 60 student-run community service groups under the Dwight Hall umbrella, and over half of all undergraduates volunteer in some capacity.

Still, many New Haven residents perceive Yale as an impersonal institution, partly because some Yale students do not follow through with their community service commitments. "Yalies are notoriously overloaded with classwork and extracurricular activities, but signing up for TIES [Teaching in Elementary Schools] implies an agreement to follow through with it for the whole term," Nicole Castonguay, SM '00, Silliman's TIES coordinator said. "Absenteeism strains our relations with the school. I've heard that people prefer [University of] Southern Connecticut volunteers over Yalies because they're more reliable."

Although statistics provided by Dwight Hall indicate that over 1,000 Yale undergraduates mentor New Haven public school children, continuity among Yale tutors remains a problem. This issue was stressed at neighborhood teas last fall--events bringing together Yale students and New Haven residents. At a tea in the Hill Neighborhood on Mon., Sept. 28, 1998, Luis Ricalde, a teacher at Vincent Mauro Elementary School, said of the school's tutors, "They come and go. The kids need some of the experience that [the tutors] carry, but there's no continuity, so the kids are very disappointed." Castonguay added that when Yale students fail to show up for their scheduled tutoring, "they disappoint their tutee, they mess up the teacher's schedule, and they give Yale a very bad reputation."

YHHAP is one group trying to better connect the Yale and New Haven communities. The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) is one of YHHAP's 12 projects. "YHHAP has offered a very significant support system by recruiting students to help with the soup kitchen operation, from helping to prepare meals, serving, co-coordinating activities, and participating in fund-raising events," Willis Diggs, a New Haven resident and director of DESK, said. Klein added, "Community service can be mass produced."

But within the mass-produced format, Yale volunteers at the soup kitchens seek to "have personal interactions with the guests," Klein
said. Similarly, according to Klein, YHHAP members who deliver meals to homebound AIDS patients through a new project called Caring Cuisine look to offer "a human face with the food they
are delivering."

Yalies also add their personal touches to other community sectors. At Yale-New Haven Hospital, undergraduate volunteers offer a human touch in a potentially impersonal environment. As Daniel Guss, SM '01, co-coordinator for undergraduate Emergency Room volunteers, said, "In the
ER, there are a lot of budget cuts which create understaffing problems, so volunteers bring a more human side to
the hospital."

New Haven public school administrators and students genrally react positively to Yale students' volunteer efforts. "Yale students play a critical role in helping kids on a one-on-one basis," Robert Millette, the administrative program director for Troup Middle School, explained. He spoke favorably of such programs as Science and Math Achiever Teams (SMArT), a program in which over 100 Yale volunteers work individually with students at Troup and Roberto Clemente Middle Schools.

Despite Yalies' efforts to reach out to New Haven, Yale as an institution is often criticized for seeming closed off from the rest of the city. As a response to this perception, Michael Morand of Yale's Office of New Haven Affairs said, "[Community service] shouldn't just be about Yalies going out into New Haven, but also about letting people come in."

A number of Yale volunteer groups are making attempts to give community members in their programs access to the Yale campus. SMArT encourages all of its volunteers to invite their students to campus through such events as Yale Day. Ebony Monton, a sixth grade student at Troup Middle School and SMArT participant, expressed enthusiasm for the event: "We get to meet [Yale students'] roommates and see the different things they have at their school."

Summer athletic camps sponsored by the Yale Department of Athletics and community programs offered by the Peabody Museum are examples of other ways in which the University welcomes community interaction on campus. Morand summarized the efforts of Yale students' volunteer efforts both on and off campus: "Personal relationships help people understand what Yale is."

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