Leadership Through Volunteering

Former Courier Leads Wabash College CARE Team Response

Eric Lakomek

Editor’s note: Eric Lakomek participated in the Frontier Courier program during the summer of 2019, between his sophomore and junior years at Wabash College in Indiana. Today he is a senior psychology major and member of the college’s baseball team. Eric has a history of community service and leadership. As a freshman in high school, he started “The Red Shoe Project” which collected sports equipment for underprivileged children. As he describes in his story below, he credits his experience as Courier for helping to expand his understanding of the importance of serving others. It is a lesson he has put into action once again at Wabash College during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Here, in his own words, he describes the work of the Wabash College “CARE” team.

In response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, many colleges and universities across the country struggled to develop a plan to bring students back in the fall 2020 semester for in-person education. Wabash College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, developed the COVID-19 Action Response and Education (CARE) Team to address a residential learning experience’s challenges amid the COVID-19 Pandemic. The CARE Team educated students about relevant COVID-19 information and best practices, provided updates from the administration, acted as a liaison for bidirectional communication between students and administration, and served in other roles surrounding mental health support, meal deliveries, and overall well-being of students. The holistic nature of the program, led by undergraduate students, made this one of the distinctive aspects of the campus’s COVID-19 response. Wabash College was successful at remaining residential for the entirety of the semester. A large part of the success was due to the implementation of the CARE Team’s peer-to-peer support structure. I served in the peer-to-peer support structure of the CARE Team as a manager. In this role, I oversaw a group of my fellow student leaders (CARE Team leaders) who were tasked with educating the student body about COVID-19 public health practices. I met with the leaders weekly and disseminated important information that was required for the response on campus. Throughout the fall semester, I faced questions from students who had reservations about complying with public health measures, who were uncertain about the state of campus, and who needed an ear to have their voices heard. Reassuring them and

Eric Lakomek (top left) and the other CARE Team managers. Eric Lakomek sitting on the 116-year-old Senior Bench at Wabash College.

aiding in addressing concerns speaks to the importance of the role in campus response. I successfully helped Wabash College navigate operations through the middle of a pandemic and took the chance to give back to the place that has given so much to me. I became involved on the CARE Team after the work I did over the summer with the Healthy Campus Task Force (HCTF). The Wabash College HCTF was created to examine and propose changes to the facilities, procedures, practices, and operations to limit and effectively manage COVID-19 spread on campus. This committee included representation from the Wabash College Student Health Center (the college physician and nurse), administration (deans), faculty, and students. Keeping the health and safety of all Wabash community members in mind, the HCTF adjusted the day-to-day procedures related to the college in response to COVID-19 through the development of a community-based program. I served as the student body representative and helped work to develop the programming of the CARE Team.

Working with the Wabash College administration on public health issues in real-time was such a unique experience.