'Infecting' Students With Volunteerism
Mike Giancola has a talent for inspiring young people.
Two years ago, he arranged for students of North Carolina State University to pile into one of the school's auditoriums to pack more than 300,000 meals into bags for school kids in Haiti and people in Peru who had just suffered a terrible earthquake, according to an article by Jay Price in the News Observer.
That feat is just one of the many projects Giancola has guided as director of North Carolina State's Center for Student Leadership, Ethics and Public Service, or CSLEPS.
"Beyond the comfort zone is where more than 1,500 NCSU students have found themselves when they embarked on nearly 90 CSLEPS-sponsored service trips over the past 12 years, typically during spring or fall breaks. This past week, the latest group of students to sign up for the trips found out which ones they would get," Price wrote.
College kids who enroll in the program, some of whom may have never been on an airplane flight, "find themselves in places such as post-Katrina New Orleans, Ecuador, Ghana, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka, building houses, improving water systems or working in a free clinic," all in an unfamiliar place.
"I tell students my job is to infect them and make them sick," Giancola told Price. "They say 'What does that mean?' and I reply 'I'm going to make you sick with some realities of the world. It's not for me to tell you what to do about them, but you'll be called based on whatever force that drives you to do something about it.'"
For students who want to stay closer to home, Giancola's CSLEPS runs "development workshops for students and a four-year leadership development program for 50 NCSU students. Since 1999, CSLEPS student teams have helped build 52 houses around the world, donated $186,500 to Habitat for Humanity and worked 36,000 hours" on projects at home and abroad.
Photo courtesy of john.d.long, via Flickr
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