Global Days of Service

BY JESSICA WINTER

1,200 SNHU Community Members Support More Than 135 Organizations During Global Days Of Service

More than 1,200 Southern New Hampshire University staff, faculty, students, alumni and volunteers contributed more than 5,500 hours of service to more than 135 organizations through SNHU’s seventh annual Global Days of Service. This year’s annual community service initiative spanned two months – March and April. While the Global Days of Service planning committee once again encouraged do-it-yourself (DIY) projects, this year also welcomed the return of several in-person projects. The COVID-19 pandemic forced all in-person projects to be postponed during the previous two years, creating a 100 percent DIY initiative. This opened the opportunity for increased participation by the global SNHU community and was seen as a valuable component to the annual initiative. It is an element that will be kept into the future. This year’s volunteer leaders and staff organizers created 10 DIY (global) and 24 in-person (local) projects. These opportunities for engagement resulted in an increase of 150 more volunteers than in the prior year, with geographic representation from 46 states in the U.S., plus D.C. and Guam, and five countries.

“We’ve been working hard to rebuild the movement after the pandemic,” says staff organizer and Senior Associate Director of Alumni Engagement Sara Telfer. “We were on a trajectory to reach 10,000 service hours in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and we saw a backwards slide that resulted in only 1,500 hours served that year. With our remarkable community, we’ve been rebuilding momentum through the pandemic, bringing our service hours back to where they were just a couple of years before the pandemic. I know we’ll continue to regrow the movement.” Global Days of Service is a global movement that cultivates local impact. The annual initiative aligns with SNHU’s core value to “do the right thing every time.” Through this value, we encourage the SNHU community not only to demonstrate a strong commitment to integrity and ethics, but also to do the right thing for our learners, employees and communities.

We believe our responsibility to be active community members, volunteering where we live and work, is an opportunity for organic learning, relationship building and making a positive impact.

The Global Days of Service initiative helps us to fulfill our commitment to local communities, while offering SNHU community members the opportunity to serve the causes they’re passionate about.

GLOBAL DAYS INSPIRES FORMATION OF NONPROFIT

This year’s projects provided service to a breadth of causes – veterans, animals, the environment, health and wellness, food banks and many more. One of the do-from-anywhere projects was “Bee Buddies: Planting for Pollinators.” You’ve probably heard that we face some serious bee issues around the world. As of this writing, several species of bees are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Pesticide usage, extreme weather conditions resulting from climate change, natural disasters and deforestation are all contributing factors to the decline of bee populations. Bees are a vital part of the ecosystem and essential to the pollination of our food crops. But we can help and that’s what this project was all about!

More than 200 SNHU community members participated in the Bee Buddies project. They planted their own indoor and outdoor bee gardens. Some coordinated with local organizations in their areas to plant bee-friendly plants in community gardens and common spaces. Many participants completed their plantings on or around April 22, in honor of Earth Day. Southern New Hampshire University online student Brandon Bolton of Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was one of the project organizers, said his favorite parts of the experience was assembling a diverse group of students, planning the planting events and conducting them. “Using skills and knowledge that I learned both at SNHU and in my work positions, and applying them to a charitable event, made everything better,” says

Bolton, who was inspired to participate in Global Days of Service because it mixed things up for him a bit. “I volunteer a lot with nonprofits,” he continues. “Those are normally in the civic tech scene, so it was refreshing to be involved in a new type of project. But I could still rely on my tech skills that I developed over the years. Starting at ground one with creating the project, planning everything and being a leader was an amazing experience.”

One of the best parts of this project’s story is that its site leader, Cassi Key of Garden Gove, California, was so inspired by her involvement in Global Days of Service that she founded a new nonprofit organization, aptly named Bee Buddies, as a result of her participation. Key has aligned her organization’s model with the Global Days calendar. The nonprofit will focus on education and fundraising in early spring (when Global Days starts), and then participants will plant seeds on Earth Day Weekend.

“Our goal is to educate and motivate our communities to protect and preserve pollinators,” says Key.

Bee Buddy packages containing bee friendly seeds were sold out on the Bee Buddies website. The organization also hosted an educational event at the Hands Together preschool in Santa Ana, California, on Earth Day. More than 70 children learned about how to plant for pollinators and be a buddy to the bees. The origin story of Bee Buddies and efforts of SNHUperstars like Key pay the highest compliment to SNHU’s Global Days.

CONNECTORS CONNECT THROUGH SERVICE

The SNHU Partnerships team’s purpose is to connect organizations with America’s largest private nonprofit university to provide educational opportunities for their students, employees, clients and members. The team is fully remote and works across the entire U.S. to best support the academic, military and corporate organizations with whom SNHU partners. Being geographically dispersed, the team looks for opportunities a couple of times throughout the year to bring all team members together in one physical space. Their time together typically includes training, a full-day team meeting or community service. They do their best to schedule these visits around SNHU’s Commencement celebrations to participate in the festivities from a volunteer standpoint, but also to be

reminded of why they do what they do each day and witness our learners’ most special day. The nearly 40 members of the SNHU Partnerships team are no strangers to community service. All SNHU employees are encouraged to support SNHU’s commitment to making positive social impact in the communities where we live and work – year-round, not only during SNHU’s Global Days of Service. But this often takes the form of a single employee volunteering at a local homeless or animal shelter, school, hospital, community garden or any number of other places they can make an impact. They’re encouraged to connect with their local communities through service. This year’s meeting of the SNHU Partnership team brought everyone together to participate in two Global Days of Service projects, each supporting the New Hampshire Food Bank – the only food bank in New Hampshire. The multi-day, multiopportunity projects enabled the team to pack food in preparation for distribution and work in the food bank’s production garden. They helped with spring gardening tasks, such as flipping the beds, preparing the fields and digging new beds. ”Being a fully remote team that is dispersed across the US, getting together and bonding as a team can be a real challenge,” says Senior Director of Strategic Implementation Krista Leidemer. “Participating in a service project allowed us the opportunity to spend some quality time together outside of the normal dayto-day virtual work environment that we’ve become accustomed to, all while giving back to the community. We had a lot of fun and it was a great reminder to all of us how fortunate we are to be a part of this team and the SNHU community.”

To learn more about how you can get involved with Global Days of Service, visit alumni.snhu.edu/serve.