Students MOVE into Volunteering

On Aug. 25, more than 200 Georgia Tech freshmen swarmed metro Atlanta to take part in 15 service projects.

The event, Into the Streets, was designed to get first-year students engaged in volunteering and build relationships beyond campus. After the event, participants gathered at the Campanile and learned more about volunteer opportunities at Tech.

Into the Streets was organized by Mobilizing Opportunities for Volunteer Experience (known by the far-easier-to-remember acronym MOVE), an umbrella organization for community service and volunteering at Georgia Tech.

The group’s president, Davina Morrow, a fourth-year chemical and biomolecular engineering major, joined MOVE as a freshman. She had been volunteering on her own at a few places, but she struggled to figure out travel plans to each site. Among the services that MOVE offers is coordinating transportation for groups of volunteers.

The organization is involved with a wide range of service projects. There are mentoring opportunities, fundraisers and hands-on projects. Students can work with large nonprofits or help with bingo night at a senior citizens home.

“We hope to increase the number of service projects, the number of hours of community service and the number of people participating in service projects this year,” Morrow said. “I hope to reach out to more graduate students and Georgia Tech faculty as well.”

Caroline Gwynn, a third-year science, technology and culture major, is vice president of projects for MOVE. Her brother has a mental disability, and when she saw a flier for MOVE’s committee that works on disabilities-related projects, she got involved.

What she likes most about the organization is the breadth of its projects.

“We have committees that work with many different groups: young people, senior citizens, the medical community, schools, the homeless, the disabled and more,” Gwynn said. “And the beauty of MOVE is that because we are such a well-established organization, we have the ability to create new service opportunities and sustain them year after year. If a student comes to us with the desire to create a volunteer opportunity that doesn’t currently exist at Georgia Tech, we can help them create that opportunity and we can ensure that it will continue even after that student graduates.”

If the record number of students attending Into the Streets this year was any indication, MOVE can count on bigger things in its future.

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