Pitt Volunteer Efforts to Continue Throughout Summer

Even though the end of the academic year is approaching, that doesn’t mean Pitt students, staff or faculty will phase out their volunteer work.

During this National Volunteer Week, the staff at Pitt Serves is busy coordinating volunteer activities to keep Pitt students busy over the summer. A number of them attended last week’s End of Year Volunteer Fair to sign up to help throughout the community the coming months.

Those activities are listed on this calendar.

Pitt Serves Assistant Director Shenay Jeffrey says there was an enthusiastic turnout of student volunteers throughout the pandemic. Popular projects ranged from assisting at food banks to virtually tutoring Pittsburgh Public School students at the United Way Learning Hubs. Some 1,500 students participated in last October’s Civic Action Week.

Senior Eric Chiu, who majors in health and rehabilitation sciences, likes to volunteer at Pittsburgh’s urban farms. He created dried soup packets at Manchester’s Growing Together Farm, and cleared land and built planting beds at farms in East Liberty, Hazelwood and Mt. Oliver. Through TreeVitalize Pittsburgh, Chiu helped plant hundreds of trees along the North Shore and directly in front of Heinz Field.

“There’s something uniquely rewarding about volunteering in a hands-on labor-intensive project like gardening,” said Chiu. “When the project is finished, you can always sense a feeling of accomplishment and optimism in the group which is an amazing experience.”

Junior Samantha Huynh, another health and rehab major, also prefers the outdoors and enjoys helping Friends of Southside Parks. Her favorite part? “To connect quickly with a stranger who is also passionate about serving.”

Another popular activity for students was the tutoring—assisting students from the Northside, Hazelwood, Homewood and other neighborhoods with math, science and other subjects. Through that, Jeffrey says the students were able to see first-hand how direct volunteering may even impact policy. For example, the students were able to see just how many households in some neighborhoods lacked internet access.

“Our student volunteers could learn and grow right alongside the community and see the resilience and strength of the people,” she said. Jeffrey said volunteering during a public health crisis says a lot about how humans respond to one another. “The pandemic heightened what was already there,” she said.

Faculty and staff contributions

More than 800 Pitt faculty and staff members began calling last spring to participate in the Pitt Pandemic Service Initiative, an institution-wide effort to fill the gaps of unmet needs.

Just some of the results included:

• An initiative called Beyond the Laptops, in which Pitt donated 599 laptops and funding to help provide families with tech devices;
• A full-time Community Tech Help Desk for the region which offered free assistance and was manned by 30 volunteers;
• Work by Community Engagement Fellows and students from the School of Social Work who fanned out across Homewood, providing tech assistance and help with remote learning; and

Helping Farmers to Families distribute some 6,000 pounds of food across six sites in Allegheny County last fall.

Alex Toner, assistant director of community engagement in the Office of Community and Governmental Relations, says volunteers stepped up to take part in more than 30 opportunities.

“They leveraged big hearts and broad expertise,” he said.

Toner says the pandemic has reminded the Pitt community of how important service is to our mission. “It’s highlighted how necessary it is to strengthen and deepen our commitment to working with community partners to address challenges that simply won’t go away when everyone is vaccinated,” he said.

In fact, Toner thinks even more Pitt staff and faculty volunteers will be needed after the pandemic ends. He encourages the Pitt community to subscribe to the Pitt in Action newsletter and to continue to take part in a “culture of service across the Pitt campus.”