MLK Day of Service

Along with a group of IA scholars, I participated in OSU’s campus-wide MLK Day of Service event. Before we went out to serve the Hale Black Cultural Center, the campus baptist church, and various choirs and dance groups honored the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by recollecting his accomplishments and intentions, as well as asserting that meaningful service transcends the immediate activity and facilitates deeper connections within a larger community, which should be the goal of all students and residents of a large community like OSU and a rapidly growing city like Columbus. After the presentation, our group loaded onto a bus and was shuttled to ALL THAT, an after school program for underserved kids in the Columbus area that provides food, tudors, financial guidance, and supplemental academic instruction for children who might otherwise not receive such resources. When we arrived at ALL THAT, we worked to do a deep clean of the basement area. We cleaned surfaces, swept and mopped floors, and organized diffuse materials and resources as well as arranged materials for student and mentor access. These typical cleaning activities, while seemingly mundane, helped to create a much more presentable work and congregation space for the students and mentors utilizing it. The activities we completed comprise the basis of structural change, which is developing intimate and meaningful connections within a community, and because of this event, I was able to re-evaluate my priorities as a college student. As I am surrounded by so much material in economics or international studies classes that possesses large implications and interprets events of extremely large scale, grounding these macro-level phenomena in community-specific action has helped to reinvigorate my commitment to constructing and maintaining sustainable communities.