I sat down with Ian Campbell of the Center for Community Based Learning and Action (CCBLA) to talk about a little-known resource on campus. The CCBLA has been working to connect students with volunteer opportunities since 2004.
So what exactly is the CCBLA and what do you guys do here?
The CCBLA is a center that seeks to mobilize the Evergreen student body in useful and meaningful ways that affect change in the community. We do this through primarily being a database for the needs of local nonprofits and organizations as well as being a center where students can drop in and come to us and essentially shop through the community’s needs for internships.
What sites are the CCBLA currently working with to help connect student volunteers to?
Some of our long time partners are GRUB [Garden Based Bounty], Left Foot Organics, POWER [Parents Organizing for Wellfare and Economic Rights], Mason County Literacy, LEED, Stonewall Youth, Gateways, Books for Prisioners, all the public schools in the area and some of the private schools, Community Youth Services, EGYHOP [Emma Goldman Youth & Homeless Outreah Program] and the food bank.
And if a student wants to volunteer at one of those places, they just come up and talk to you and you help them find a way to do that?
We either have direct contacts we can give to them, or we have information on if someplace like Left Foot Organics is seeking an internship we might have specific information about exactly what they’re looking for.
What are the community action days?
Our action days are something that we try to put on once a month and its something along the same lines as the Community-to-Community Day that we do every beginning of the school year at Orientation Week, they’re just smaller-scale, and we visit many of the same partners that we do on Community-to-Community Day. It’s just a way for us to try and really get the students out of their shells and go out and volunteer and not be just an idle database, but actively seeking to promote involvement because . . . it all comes back to service learning, learning through doing, that’s really what our over-arching mission is. To further service learning at The Evergreen State College, and not just be some little isolated academic pocket.
What's been your favorite volunteering experience?
My favorite so far has probably been to see how the impact that I do volunteering affects people in the community and youth, and it’s just very, very moving when you see someone like the people at GRUB, and we come there with a dozen, two dozen people and they have all of this work to do, and they preface the whole project by saying, “We don’t expect this all to get done," and then we just bust our all and we do it and they’re so happy. The last time I volunteered at GRUB actually, there was someone who almost thought he was going to tear up because of how much work we had done and he’s looking at it and he says, "This would have taken me two weeks." ‘Cause nonprofits, especially in the economy right now, really need volunteers more than anything because they’re so hurting for manpower.
What would you say to students who are considering getting involved with the CCBLA who know how to get started?
I would say definitely come in and talk to us. I am specifically the mentor/tutor coordinator, so I focus more on the schools than anything, but we have more resources here than I think anyone really imagines. I would also suggest that most people thinking about getting involved with the community look at themselves and they say, "I have no experience. No one would want me to help. I would just get in the way." And I really cannot stress how much that is not true. If you have absolutely no experience and you think you have no skills, I can guarantee you they will find a spot where you’ll be incredibly useful to them and you will feel useful at the end of the day too. So just don’t judge yourself before you actually take a crack at it.