Editor’s Note: Sarah Feinberg is a former chair of the Daily’s Ethics and Inclusion Committee. Feinberg was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
If you were walking around the Tufts campus on Friday, March 27, you may have seen a large group of students and faculty near Breed Memorial Hall. The group was decked out in blue T-shirts and armed with litter pickers as they worked to clean up trash on Tufts’ campus. While you may have only seen this one group, they were actually part of a much larger event. March 27 marked this year’s Leonard Carmichael Society Day of Service.
Held each spring, LCS Day of Service is one of the organization’s largest events, open to all undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, alumni and community members. This year marked the fourth annual LCS Day of Service, hosting 11 different service sites and about 136 volunteers.
LCS, Tufts’ largest community-service-focused organization, serves as the umbrella for its 24 subgroups. LCS supports its subgroups by handling funding, assisting with transportation and helping them liaise with the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. The subgroups are individual community service clubs that support a wide variety of communities and missions.
Some of the subgroups include Advancing Civic Thought In Our Nation, or ACTION, a nonpartisan club that teaches youth in the Greater Boston Area the importance of community engagement, and Tufts Giving Camp, a group that volunteers at the Walnut Street Center with adults with intellectual disabilities. One of the newer clubs, Homelessness Outreach and Meal Equity, or HOME, provides students with volunteer opportunities year-round at places like the Salvation Army.
For juniors and co-presidents Aditi Dosi and Sarah Feinberg, LCS has been a significant part of their time at Tufts. Both were introduced to the organization through First-Year Orientation CommUnity Service, one of Tufts’ pre-orientation programs. FOCUS introduces first-year students to community service and engagement in the Medford, Somerville and the Greater Boston area in addition to easing their transition to Tufts. Before her first year, Dosi participated in the LCS subgroup Giving Camp through FOCUS.
“The FOCUS community is very, very strong,” Dosi said. “I received a lot of mentorship from the upperclassmen. … They encouraged us to get involved with LCS.”
Feinberg echoed this sentiment, emphasizing her long-standing commitment to community service.
“I knew that I wanted to get involved with community service here at Tufts,” Feinberg said. “I’ve had that be a big part of my life when I was younger — throughout high school and everything — and then I did FOCUS coming into Tufts, so I knew that that was part of the Tufts community I wanted to be engaged in.”
Now, Dosi and Feinberg run LCS with the help of their other executive board members. As co-presidents, they oversee the club’s logistics, publicity and treasury. They are also the bridge connecting students in LCS to their faculty support. Dosi and Feinberg have biweekly meetings with their LCS advisers from on-campus resources like the Government and Community Relations team, Tisch College and the Office for Campus Life.
In addition to supporting their subgroups, LCS organizes two major events each year: Halloween on the Hill in the fall semester and Day of Service in the spring.
During Halloween on the Hill, many Tufts organizations — including LCS subgroups, athletic teams and Greek organizations — host booths or activities for children in the community.
“We do Halloween on the Hill in the fall, where we bring a bunch of groups together on Academic Quad for kids in the community to come and trick-or-treat during the day and get to do some fun activities with our groups on campus,” sophomore Kira Sutcliffe, one of the LCS subgroup chairs, said.
While Halloween on the Hill fosters community engagement between Tufts organizations and local youth, LCS Day of Service emphasizes direct engagement between Tufts students and local community organizations.
For Tufts students, LCS Day of Service is a way to take a break from their books and laptops and step outside their ‘Tufts bubble.’
“With Day of Service, we honestly tried to do as much publicity as possible to get that diverse range of students,” Dosi said. “Especially now, just engaging with the community feels really impactful.”
It is a chance for students to come together and make a small difference in the communities they inhabit every day. More than that, the event connects students to a wide variety of local organizations doing this work year-round.
“We had Somerville Homeless Coalition [and] Project SOUP working on food insecurity. We did work with Tufts Legacy Project again, so we had students go to the [Visiting Nurse Association] Senior Living and do activities with the seniors there,” Feinberg said. “Same thing with Giving Camp. We had a group go there and do activities with adults with disabilities at the Walnut Street Center and had some other groups, like Cancer Outreach, doing packaging.”
LCS Day of Service highlights the work that many local organizations do, not only introducing members of the Tufts community to LCS but also encouraging them to be engaged citizens year-round.
“Being part of such a massive, powerful institution like Tufts, we definitely have a responsibility to give back to these communities that are doing us such a service by allowing us to be here, but also recognizing that our institution does have negative effects on our local communities,” Sutcliffe said.
Tufts is an elite institution — 77% of Tufts’ students come from the top 20% of the population based on median family income, according to The New York Times. While there is no way to completely curtail the effect that the institution has on its neighbors, clubs like LCS demonstrate an important effort to acknowledge and respond to the university’s impact.
“Just getting involved with any of these subgroups, or LCS [executive board], anything related to community service is a really nice way to get involved with thinking about your own placement at Tufts,” Feinberg said. “But also, it’s a great community of people. … It’s a really nice way to meet people who have similar interests or who also want to serve their community.”
