Students can participate in volunteer opportunities through URI club S.A.V.E.S. Photos contributed by S.A.V.E.S.
Students Actively Volunteering and Engaging in Service (S.A.V.E.S.), a club at the University of Rhode Island committed to community service, won’t let COVID-19 stop them from helping the local community.
As new regulations have been implemented for every on-campus club at URI, plans for scheduling volunteer events have changed, according to S.A.V.E.S. President Kaitlyn VanBennekum.
“I would stay that normally we would plan the events in the summer, so I could have those events for the upcoming year all scheduled out, but because of this year, things were changing literally week by week,” VanBennekum said. “I didn’t want to go ahead and plan an event and have it cancelled the next week because guidelines were changing.”
S.A.V.E.S holds their meetings virtually on Tuesday nights, and when it comes to facilitating the service events, they are working hard to maintain all the COVID-19 guidelines necessary. In some cases, this means holding both in-person and online service opportunities. This hasn’t stopped them from helping the community in whatever way they’re able to.
“I think our main goal that has always been is to help those in need and help in any way we change,” said VanBennekum. “So whether it is in person or virtually I think our service plans are going to continue to be the same.”
The organization will continue their annual volunteer initiatives. This includes an on-going fundraising campaign for The Tomorrow Fund, an organization dedicated to financially helping families with hospitalized children. The charity provides compensation for food, hospital parking and hotel costs while the families focus on the medical expenses.
“[The Tomorrow Fund does] a lot of great work with kids and their families, and we have raised upwards of $1,000 for them over the past couple years because we have done fundraisers for them every year, ” Vice President Amanda Notaratonio said. “That is our big overarching event.”
Notarantonio described the organization as being involved in a wide variety of places that they either volunteer every year or are requested to volunteer.
“We kind of see what kind of opportunities are available, so we do a lot of stuff down here in the South County area,” Notarantonio said. “There are other events where people reach out to us, so last year or the year before, we did a ‘fight for air’ climb through the Rhode Island Lung Association. They reached out to us saying we need volunteers, so it kind of just depends if there are things that we think are cool or if people reach out to us.”
Additionally, S.A.V.E.S. is participating in a beach clean-up next weekend, and is also partnering with National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS) to run a booth for Fresh Check Day, a day dedicated to engaging students in conversation about mental health, on Oct. 14.
“We are basically running a booth that [talks] about how your mental health can improve [you and] help others, so it’s like a chain reaction,” VanBennekum said. “When you help someone else, it can help you too.”
As students are learning more about S.A.V.E.S. through social media and the club adjusts to new changes in terms of volunteering, Notaratonio understands the leadership has to adapt to the current environment.
“I think as an organization, we are just going to have to be adaptable and malleable in terms of the opportunities that we are offering to our members and opportunities we are going to seek out,” she said.