Volunteer opportunities available

If you are an individual or an organization that has been looking for an opportunity to lend a helping hand the Student Activities Office has some volunteer opportunities for you. The projects available are in the Worcester/Boston area and are open to the entire WPI community. Volunteers are needed for a broad range of activities from tutoring children, helping the elderly or even working with computers. Whether you can spare one hour or ten, all help is welcomed and appreciated. Anyone interested should come to the Student Activities Office, located near the Daniels mailroom, to sit down and discuss your options with Andrea Dorow and fill out a personal information sheet.

Some of the projects that SAO has available right now are Daffodil Days, Project Bread, Pleasant Street Cleanup, Operation College Cleanup, and judging middle school academic fairs.

• Daffodil Days is a project sponsored by the American Cancer Society which needs volunteers to transport flowers to local public schools on March 18th. You must have your own form of transportation and be available to make one delivery between 8 and 9am.

• Project Bread is sponsoring a project in Boston to help the one-half million starving people in Massachusetts. Volunteers are needed for a phone-a-thon and walk-a-thon. The phone-a-thon will take place during the last two weeks of March, volunteers will be calling past walkers to encourage them to walk again, they will receive training and phone scripts on arrival. On May 4th Project Bread needs even more volunteers to run their walk-a-thon as security, registration help, and set up crew.

• The Pleasant Street Cleanup project will take place in April 19th between 10am and 3pm and needs as many volunteers as possible to clean from Park Ave. to Main St. along Pleasant St.

• Operation College Cleanup will take place on April 12th at 9am, starting at Worcester State College and there will be a cookout for all participants at 1pm. The goal of OCC is to send groups around Worcester to cleanup certain sections that need help to make Worcester a better city to live in. Even though all the Colleges of the Worcester Consortium participate in this program, WPI has had a strong role in coordinating it through the IFC and Panhellenic council. This is open to the entire WPI community, and all participants will receive a T-shirt.

• Both Sullivan and All School Middle Schools need volunteers to spend a few hours judging academic fairs. On March 6th volunteers are needed at Sullivan Middle School from 7:30 to 10am (you can work in shifts) to judge projects in a variety of areas including Social Studies and Science. On March 18th The All School needs volunteers for the same purpose. The City Wide Projects Fair will take place on April 11th at Sullivan Middle School and volunteers are needed to judge between 11:45am and 3:00pm (you can work in shifts). The projects at the City Wide Fair will be that of the students that have won their middle school fairs.

Other projects that need volunteers immediately are the Odessy of the Mind program and working with Middle School theater programs in after school activities. If any of these projects interest you have other interests stop by the Student Activities Office and sign up. Even if you are interested in volunteering, but aren't sure what you would like to do, come in anyway and we will try to set you up with something that accommodates your schedule and interests.