More than 50 students on spring break from Howard University will join community volunteers tomorrow, March 19th, at 5:30 p.m., to clean trash and remove litter from the block of Seymour Avenue between Avon and Hawthorne Avenues in the city’s South Ward. The anti-litter program is part of Howard University’s nationally-acclaimed “Alternative Spring Break,” launched in 1994 to provide Howard University students with a meaningful, constructive “alternative” to the indulgence-centered spring break activities that have dominated the commercial media in recent years.
The efforts in Newark will support Mayor Baraka’s Model Neighborhood Initiative, which has targeted that portion of the South Ward for intense public safety, redevelopment, and community engagement efforts. Mayor Baraka, like his father, the late poet Amiri Baraka, is a Howard University alumnus. The students, 50 of them, including some from Newark, are already doing other volunteer projects at various sites throughout the city and will conclude with a community engagement walk, another civic participation initiative by Mayor Baraka, at week’s end. The aftermath of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans inspired the meaningful growth of the Alternative Spring Break project, which has since appeared in several cities including New Orleans, Memphis, Detroit, Washington, DC, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. It has also served abroad in Haiti.
Alternative Spring Break has been spotlighted on BET, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press and The Hilltop. The 2006 New Orleans participants, some 250 volunteers, were recognized on ABC’s World News Tonight with the highly coveted ‘People of the Week’ Award. Last year, on the strength and merits of the project, Howard University was named to President Obama’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, the highest distinction that a higher education institution can receive for community service.
