College of Charleston Students Serve Community for Spring Break

^{Above: (bottom row, l–r) Chase Weaver, Maura Woods (Career Center), Jordan Crimmins and Cadence Brown; (back row, l–r) Duaa Jamaluddin, Riley Cowan, Amanda Metenosky, Helena Weymouth, Paul Alford (Fuller Center Disaster Rebuilders); the group found this T-shirt, reading “Love Wins,” under all the muck. (Photos by the Center for Civic Engagement)}

Tucked into the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the rural town of Burnsville, North Carolina, is usually not the first place you’d choose when considering a spring break destination. But it was the ideal spot for 11 College of Charleston students and four staff members who spent several days of their spring break helping to rebuild the town that was devastated by Tropical Storm Helene last year. 

The trip, part of the Alternative Spring Break program sponsored by CofC’s Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), allowed students to participate in the volunteer effort to help clean up one of the areas of the country hardest hit by the storm.  

From sunrise to sunset, the students removed mud, built trenches and helped to lay out the vapor barriers on the foundation floor of a home that had been stripped bare to its studs by the flood waters. The work was hard, and the hours were long, but the gratitude of the people of North Carolina was enormous. 

Cadence Brown, a sophomore Bonner Leader, who helped lead the trip, recalls meeting the homeowner of the house they worked on.

“When she saw how much mud we had cleared from her house, she broke down in tears,” says Brown. “For the first time since the storm, she had a place to park her car. That moment made everything we were doing feel even more real. We realized it wasn’t just about cleaning up debris. It was about restoring a sense of normalcy, even in small ways.”

For the students, the four-day experience challenged their own sense of normalcy, too, often through thoughtful discussions that took place after the shovels, dirty work gloves and wheelbarrows had all been packed away.

“Every night, we sat down together over meals that residents had made for us, listening to their hurricane stories,” says Brown. “They had lost everything – their prized possessions, their loved ones, their ability to ever listen to a storm peacefully again, and much more. After all they had been through, all the lack of security and normalcy that had forced its way into their lives, they ensured that we always felt comfortable and at home. Their generosity, even after so much loss, was humbling.”

First-year student Caroline Dumm says getting involved and making an impact is much easier than you think.

“It’s easy to assume that one person can’t make a significant impact on such a devastating disaster, but the people of Burnsville were thrilled just to be able to share their stories with us,” she says. “The smiles and tears shed when saying goodbye to the people we had met proved to me that we had made a lasting impression by simply listening.”

Stephanie Visser, director of the CCE, says the Alternative Spring Break aims to empower students to become more informed about issues that impact communities they care about.

“We do that with education, direct service and reflection so that students aren’t ‘just’ volunteering, but also building transferrable skills for life that prepare them to be active citizens,” says Visser. “To be welcomed into a community that is not your own is a gift, one that I know our students will repay.”

In addition to those participants listed above, the following were on the trip: Grey Crotts, Caroline Dumm, Parag Desai (CCE), Bailey Dunn, Kendall Konieczny, Anne McGrath (CCE) andJohn McGrath (School of Business).