SGA spends night in homeless shelter
By Dave Msseemmaa
Associate Editor
A hitchhiker en route from Wyoming to the East Coast was telling his story.IVCC student trustee Jacob Frost listened.Other homeless, err, houseless guests at the PADS shelter were talking to some of the other Student Government Association volunteers and watching The Simpsons in the basement of Ottawa’s City Hall.
“We’re not homeless – home is where the heart is. We’re just houseless,” said one guest.SGA delivered food to the shelter and signed the guests into the shelter in two shifts between 6:30 p.m. and 7 a.m. on the night of Feb. 11.
“It’s fun because we get to know each other better and its all about serving a good cause,” said freshmen representative Lisa Twardowski, who worked the late shift starting at 1 a.m. “It hard to get to know each other during our regular meetings at 7:15 a.m., but it becomes a lot easier when you’re sitting next to someone for six hours.”
The PADS manual described an important duty of the volunteer as being as friendly and talkative as possible with the guests to make them feel welcome and avoid letting the stay at the shelter be a blow to the guests’ pride.
“I don’t know if I’d call it rewarding,” said one SGA member. “It’s a good feeling being helpful to a charity like this, but it makes me feel like I should have been volunteering for things like this before.”
Further duties of the volunteers were keeping an incidence log of medicines handed out and any problems that might arise and helping the guests with laundry or bedding if needed.
-- SGA is co-sponsoring Adawee, a black female percussion group, to play at the Cultural Center on Feb. 27 at 12:15 p.m. in honor of Black History Month.
-- The group has also sent a letter requesting the idea of an activity hour looked into for Fall 2001 to administration. The activity hour would be a time during the day when minimal classes were scheduled to increase availability for student involvement in campus clubs. SGA decided the most effective time for an activity hour would be Wednesdays from noon until 1 p.m.