there you go
today we are having the group of football students they are
giving the work to Riverside Park and in order for us to keep this park going we
have to have groups helping us
we're working there every day Monday through
Friday and you see the same people you know walking their dogs down the street
they wave to us you know they say hi we have other people come up and say you know thank you
it's been really cool to be able to like work in the community
with people and kind of experience with New York's really like in this month that
we're spending here
the athletes came in and helped out with the pre-k classes
and they helped out in a variety of ways they helped out by reading to the kids
they helped out with playing with them taking them on trips and that was a huge
benefit for us
I really like playing with the kids because we work with kids
and it's just a great way to give back and to meet new people
one of the little kids every day we come in he goes, "he's so big! and you're so big too!" and it's a lot
of fun to you know see their response
it's alright
the ability to be able to become part of a team and to integrate yourself into a different society is is
valuable for us on the football field it's obviously going to be valuable for
them in the classroom I mean the core curriculum at Columbia thrives on
looking at different situations from a different perspective so this all fits
together whether it be the academic experience whether it be the career
development experience whether it be the team experience you know on the field
all those things stem from your ability to be able to interact see things from a
different point of view and integrate yourself into different parts of society
when Columbia's a football coach approached me about a desire to create a
community program for the football freshman so they could be introduced to
New York and really understand about what it means to be a leader and he made
it clear that he wanted to raise up good citizens
it he cared about what happened on the field greatly but he really wanted to
build good citizens and he said can you help
with pre-k we really want each kid
to be on hand with someone else and we never have enough we can never afford
enough staff and we can never recruit enough volunteers to manage you know so
that we have a one adult to two two two children ratio but with the football
players coming in you know I mean they could grab four kids in each hand
practically just because the size difference it was amazing so it was
great to have their help to be able to do all that
this has been eye-opening experience because I never saw this side of our community before in New York City
and it's great to get in touch with our new community for the next four years
"go green" on three. 1, 2, 3,
go green!
environmental stewardship is constantly working with
many different student groups across the organization and so this is a perfect
opportunity for the football players to fit right in with that game plan that we
have to bridge that gap between our office and many different student groups
so that they can be ambassadors to the community and educate everyone else
about sustainability and the right thing to do
it's like not even service work for me when I'm outside helping the environment you know I'm just so in sync
with with nature so I feel like it was kind of a blessing to be placed on the
environmental stewardship team where I'mreally doing what I love and what I want
to do occupation wise when I get older
Columbia has been very helpful
and this, these children, they need to inter-interact with the community and
this is the best way that they can interact with the community working
around the people and doing stuff that they they're going to experience what
this community is all about
they were able to then reflect this is something
we learned through service learning you reflect on what service you've done and
what it means and why it's important and through that reflection you get to then
think about who you are in this world: who are you? what kind of leader do you really want to be?
I think we as a group of seven bonded more probably than any of the
other teams because we had to do more team-oriented stuff
all the players knew that we'd be coming up and working around campus in some type of way but we didn't
really know what exactly they would have us doing I didn't expect to be as
involved with the community and with the city itself as much as we were I think it's
definitely been a great experience
a lot of these guys are are from much
different places than New York City. It's a life lesson to learn how to interact a
little bit out of your comfort zone and we start that as fast as we can and and
one of the residual positives obviously is that they become more familiar with
with Columbia and the people here and living and getting around and taking a
subway for the first time and doing all those things so this is a win-win
situation for everybody involved and this is just part of that and the fact
that it grows organically the fact that these kids become better people through
this experience not only helps our football team but it helps it helps
everybody involved with the University and in our ultimate goal here is to
create a program that everybody can be proud of