George Fox University will continue its tradition of sending students to serve diverse populations during the school’s weeklong spring break March 18-27. About 50 students are joining employee leaders for the university’s annual Spring Serve in five locations.
This year, volunteers will travel to Yakima, Seattle and the Yakima Reservation in Washington – as well as to Los Angeles and to a camp for families in the disability community – to work on service projects in various cross-cultural settings.
The following are descriptions of the five trips:
· A team will serve at Urban Impact in Seattle, focusing on building relationships and serving in the community through the local church. The team will do a variety of projects, which may include tutoring, administrative work and cleaning.
· A team of students will partner with Mending Wings, a nonprofit Native American youth organization based on the Yakima Reservation in Washington state. The team will help reservation residents paint homes, clean yards, chop wood, mow, and do light construction projects.
· A group of students will go to Flying H Ranch in Yakima, Wash., to work with at-risk youth. The team will do physical labor and spend time with boy residents in worship, devotions, meals, games and conversation.
· A team will travel to Los Angeles to work with Word Made Flesh, a center that focuses on cultivating relationships, reaching out to neighbors and establishing partnerships with local churches and nonprofit organizations in a low-income neighborhood of the city.
· Finally, a fifth team will partner and serve with Camp Attitude, a not-for-profit Christian organization dedicated to providing a unique faith-based camping experience for families in the disability community.
Participating students are selected through an application process. They pay part of the costs of their trips, which are subsidized by the student government. Each of the trips has a faculty, staff, or alumni leader, assisted by two undergraduate student leaders.
The trips are part of the university’s commitment to Christian service, which also includes an annual day of service for which the university closes; community service projects that reach out to Newberg, Ore., and surrounding communities; and an urban services program that sends students to Portland and Salem, Ore., to build relationships with the homeless.
George Fox University is ranked by Forbes among the top Christian universities in the country and is a Christian college classified by U.S. News & World Report as a first-tier regional university. More than 3,900 students attend classes on the university’s campus in Newberg, Ore., and at teaching centers in Portland, Salem and Redmond, Ore. George Fox offers bachelor’s degrees in more than 40 majors, degree-completion programs for working adults, six seminary degrees, and 13 master’s and doctoral degrees.
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