Volunteer Vacations, one of Tufts' older travel programs, has announced it will be downsizing next year, a measure which will likely be permanent.
Volunteer Vacations organizes groups of approximately a dozen students each to travel to poor communities in the eastern United States and spend a week of their school vacation volunteering for community centers, counseling programs, or programs like Habitat for Humanity.
The program began in 1988 with one trip, but has since grown to an average of nine trips annually.
This year, however, Volunteer Vacations will sponsor only eight trips, and beginning next year, the count will drop to seven.
Representatives from the Leonard Carmichael Society (LCS), which runs Volunteer Vacations, said there are various reasons for why the program is undergoing cuts.
Junior Mari Pullen, co-president of LCS, blamed a tight budget, as LCS usually tries to cover travel and lodging costs for Volunteer Vacations.
Often, organizations that choose to sponsor a Volunteer Vacations group will put up volunteers in a local hostel or allow them space to camp out in a building. When costs unexpectedly change, this can cause difficulties.
"We changed rental companies this year, and so vans are more expensive, plus gas is more expensive," Pullen said. "It just turned out [this year]
that everything went up dramatically."
Pullen added that Volunteer Vacations did get a little windfall of financial relief from the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate's buffer fund, but not enough to defray the nearly $65 dollars that students are being charged this year to cover extra costs on Volunteer Vacations' trips.
An increasing interest in other University-sponsored trips is also a factor, according to senior Megan Chaisson, who has been a Director of the Volunteer Vacations program for three years.
She said that while she has not heard any negative responses to any of Volunteer Vacations' sponsored trips of late, interest has been declining because so many other student organizations have begun sponsoring vacation-week excursions in recent years.
"While the student body hasn't grown at all, the number of travel opportunities for it really has," she said. "Tufts students just have so many other options [that it becomes difficult to fill trips]."
Chaisson said that the group has been able to fill the necessary ranks for this spring's trips, which include two Habitat for Humanity projects to North Carolina and rural Pennsylvania, an excursion to the national parks of Assateague Island in Maryland and Virginia, and volunteer projects at community centers in Philadelphia, Pa.
Chaisson said she considers the ability to provide full, quality trips a higher priority than creating and advertising travel and volunteer opportunities that the group may ultimately be unable to sponsor.
Neither Chaisson nor Pullen, however, ruled out adding more trips in the future, should student interest in Volunteer Vacations increase once again.
Pullen said she sees a strong year of fewer trips as beneficial for Volunteer Vacations. "If the trips get filled, we'll have more pull and we'll be able to ask for more money when we need it," she said.
