While Arcadia University's first years enjoyed Spring Preview in locations such as Cuba, South Korea and Oman another group of 31 Arcadia students flew to New Iberia, Louisiana for a week of manual labor.
Alternative Spring Break (ASB) is an annual tradition of many colleges and universities where students opt out of parties by the beach in favor of going on a service trip instead. This year, Arcadia's ASB participants traveled to rural Louisiana to empower low-income communities and flood victims. Partnering with local non-profit Envision da Berry, the students set out to transform 2 empty, overgrown lots into community gardens. They also lent a hand at Envision da Berry's upcoming food co-op where local gardeners can buy and sell their excess produce. The co-op, which hopes to open its doors any day, also maintains a spacious backyard where its staff will host classes for gardeners in the making.
Here students prepare to hang a mural on the exterior of the da Berry Fresh co-op:
But it wasn't all shoveling mulch and picking up dumped trash for the Arcadia students. They were also able to get a taste of the local culture through nights out, crawfish boils, tours of a local Buddhist temple as well as the region's famous bayous.
Students marveled at both the warm weather and the warm welcome they had received from the community members who loved to stop and talk to the students. On one occasion, students said a man stopped by the community garden lot closest to his home with bags of green Powerade from the convenience store, stating that he wanted to do something nice since it was St. Patrick's Day and he'd seen them working in the 80 degree weather all day.
Faculty coordinator for the trip and head of the Community and Civic Engagement Center at Arcadia University, Cindy Rubino told the students that the gift they were giving the New Iberia community was not simply the work they'd done on the gardens, but was also the new energy that they had put into the residents in getting them excited about the projects, because at the end of the week it all comes back to the community.
