Each year the Tucker Foundation provides the opportunity for students to spend their Spring Break as part of a service-learning trip, known as Alternative Spring Break trips. Trips are student organized and run, and participants contribute to the funding for each trip through campus-wide fundraising efforts that occur during the winter term.
For more information, please contact please blitz ASB@dartmouth.edu
Participant Application: download
Faculty Fellow Application: download
Trip Leader: Hannah Sehn
This trip will bring a group of Dartmouth students the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Participants traveling to this community will work and live at the Cheyenne River Youth Project (CRYP), a community-based organization that provides afterschool activities for area youth and teens (ages 4-18), as well as various kinds of support to community families. Reflections and educational sessions for this trip will explore topics such as community stories and traditions, history of the Lakota People and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Native American sovereign nation status, and cross cultural education. While staying at the CRYP, students will have the opportunity to hear lectures from and have discussions with various important community leaders of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (including the founder of the CRYP). In addition to providing needed staffing for the CRYP, trip participants will prepare, promote and facilitate a CRYP college awareness night.
Trip Leaders: Ben Campbell, Vicki Javier
This group will work in Barrio Samán, a migrant village of roughly 100 families near the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The ASB participants aim to contribute to advancing community-defined, development projects and develop cross-cultural relationships through service. In 2008, the group built a park and a community center in addition to conducting a health survey and teaching HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention classes to youth in and around the community. In 2009, the group constructed an athletic court for the community, continued the HIV/AIDS education project, and conducted a community census focused on public health and community demographics. These projects were conducted in collaboration with the recently founded Haitian Development Organization of Samán (ODHS), made up of local men and women invested in the barrio’s wellbeing. Students will learn about how Dominicans and Haitians – two very distinct cultures – came to share the island of Hispaniola and will engage in discussions about poverty, marginalization, immigration, spirituality/religion, health and development. Service projects are still being determined.
Trip leaders: Ana Jackson, Amma Serwaah-Panin
90% of all the tomatoes consumed in the United States come from Immokalee, Florida, where a workforce—largely comprised of undocumented workers from Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti and West Africa—pick at least 5,000 lbs of tomatoes a day while earning minimum wage. In 1993, undocumented workers in Immokalee began meeting in the borrowed room of a small church to discuss how to best advocate for their individual and community human rights, and eventually formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). The CIW has now spent almost 20 years waging highly publicized, large-scale Anti-Slavery and Fair Food Campaigns against the government and private corporations. Through education and reflection sessions this trip will examine the controversial economic, social, and political issues surrounding migrant workers in America. During the ASB participants will stay and work at the Immokalee Friendship House (a shelter that partners with the CIW), visit farms, and also have opportunities to volunteer at a variety of other partner service organizations that provide services such as tutoring, legal advocacy, childcare, providing meals, etc.
Trip leaders: Larry Bowman, Karl Grunseich
Dartmouth Medical School teams have a historic relationship with rural Appalachia, but last year this trip was the first undergraduate-led experience to the area. This ASB travels to Leslie County in Eastern Kentucky, spending two weeks in rural Appalachia engaging in a range of service projects that focus on healthcare and poverty. The trip seeks to assemble a group of undergrads with diverse academic, social and political perspectives (non-pre-medical students are encouraged to apply). In education sessions participants will learn about the historic and current economic and healthcare challenges facing rural Appalachia; one of America's most marginalized and underserved regions. The ASB then spends half its time volunteering through Laurel Mission to aid in home repair and construction work for low income families in the region, and the other half of its time is spent aiding Kentucky's Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), in providing health education to area children.
Trip Leaders: Ahmad Nazeri, Uthman Olagoke, Jie Sun
The 2009 Faith in Action: San Francisco Alternative Spring Break trip seeks to bring together students from a diversity of religious and moral traditions to explore the issue of youth and homelessness in the Bay Area of California. Together, this group will work with a variety of community agencies serving homeless youth while learning about the complexity of homelessness. Service projects can range from participating in a Habitat for Humanity build to staffing a meal center. By exploring service as a shared value across religious and spiritual lines, participants will have the opportunity to develop understanding and meaningful relationships within the context of religious difference while delving deeply into personal visions of what it means to serve a community in the context of a life of faith. Students from all religious and moral traditions are encouraged to apply.
