e-mail me at billdeg@umich.edu

1/16/2006

MLK Day 2006

Lucky enough to honor Dr. King today by working at the Cass Community Service Center on Woodrow Wilson Street. Three professors and eight students from UM-Dearborn organized their food pantry, which was overrun with boxes of canned food and other donated goods. A day of sorting, stacking, cleaning, and learning about the services Cass provides, notably serving over 20,000 meals a week. The site on Woodrow Wilson also provides transitional housing for those who have found employment but can't yet afford deposit and a first month's rent.

As a commuter school, UMD provides too few opportunities for meaningful faculty-student interaction out of the classroom, so the day filled a needed gap--for both students and faculty members. The Martin Luther King Service Day was established in 1994. This year, upwards of 300 volunteers worked at fifteen sites around the D, refuting the notion that members of a commuter community want to take their classes, go home, and have little else to do with the institution.

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