As we wrap up our spotlight on Alternative Spring Break, we’d like to talk about another trip that impacts our Maryland community. The ARC of Carroll County serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities throughout their local area, providing resources for employment, education, transportation, and community living.

On this ASB trip, students will have the chance to work directly with the people the ARC supports, building bonds and breaking down stereotypes about disability. Your gift will  go towards supplies, food, lodging, and transportation for 12 students who are bound to remember this trip for the rest of their lives.

To donate to the ARC ASB trip, click here. To hear from the student leaders themselves, click the video below:

Here on the giving blog, we’ve been giving you an look at UMBC’s Alternative Spring Break programs, which give students a chance to participate in a service learning project over the March holiday. This next trip takes students right into the city of Baltimore, where, over the course of one year, at least 30,000 people will experience homelessness at one point.

Over their spring break, students will work on various projects throughout the city, and learn about how its homelessness problem intersects with poverty, crime, and other issues facing Baltimore. Your gift will go towards supplies, lodging, food, and transportation for 12 UMBC students.

To give to the Homelessness ASB trip, head to GiveCorps. To learn more about the trip from this year’s student co-leaders, take a look at this video:

As we near the end of the calendar year, we’d like to remind our community of the many places their gifts might go this holiday season. This week, we’ll be focusing on next year’s Alternative Spring Break trips. These provide a wonderful opportunity for students to spend their week off doing good for the communities and gaining a new understanding of the world.

One of these trips will take students to Patch Adams’ Gesundheit! Institute. They’ll interact with patients, help maintain the grounds, and learn about Adams’ humanistic model of health care and the Institute’s approach to social justice. In past years on this trip, students have visited veterans’ hospitals and retirement homes in the area, tended to organic gardens, and kept the Institute’s rural West Virginia campus clean and bright.

Your donation will go towards the cost of supplies, lodging, food, and transportation for 12 students over the upcoming spring break. To give to the Gesundheit! trip, head to the GiveCorps site. For more from the students themselves, take a look at this video!

This March, while most college students were enjoying freedom from the classroom or even sunny days on the beach, a number of UMBC students instead chose to spend their week off from school in service learning experiences through Alternative Spring Break (ASB).

These week-long service trips introduce students to the broad range of challenges our society faces and teach them how they can help change things for the better. Thanks to donors like you, our students were volunteering and serving for projects and organizations like: 

• The Gesundheit Institute
•  Through the Eyes of a Refugee
• The ARC of Carroll County
• Will Hope for Change
• A Better Impact

Your gifts ensured that students could take advantage of these life-changing education opportunities, so thank you! They truly will carry these memories and lessons throughout their lives.

“My ASB experience was truly memorable. I loved seeing that small actions can make an impact and I had the best time working with other students in the program,” says student Erin Wells who went on the A Better Impact trip. “I have grown so much from just one week, thank you for this opportunity.”

See more photos from the Alternative Spring Break trips!