Amber Mathis, an Elon University senior, received the 2011 Newman Civic Fellows Award from Campus Compact and served as a NC Campus Compact Summer Associate in 2008 & 2009.
2010 NC Campus Compact Summer Associates Amber Mathis (upper left) and Tamika Reynolds serve at Alamance Community College
As a senior at Elon University, I have had many opportunities to serve over the past four years. With each year there has been a new mission and a new vision for my personal service and therefore my reasons for serving have definitely changed as I have changed. I also found through my years of service that you can serve in many different ways.
I started out serving because I wanted to make a change. I began volunteering with Amnesty International my freshman year because I was outraged at the human rights atrocities that go on in our world every single day, many of which occur in the United States and even in North Carolina. As I became more educated about the issues, I became more interested in advocacy and serving by teaching and raising awareness about issues like torture, the death penalty, and immigrants’ rights.
Of course, this vision of myself as an activist changed a bit as I traveled to Costa Rica during my sophomore year. I saw students in a developing nation challenging laws, politics, presidents, mining, and police. During my time there, I thought to myself, “How embarrassed would I be if these Costa Rican students came to Elon and saw our pamphlets? How silly would they think we were? We’re not fighting—we’re just speaking calmly.”
I came back to Elon excited about a program that I had done some research on called The Campus Kitchens Project, which takes un-served food from on-campus dining locations and repackages it in to a balanced meal to send out to the community. That summer, with Costa Rican fire inside me, as an AmeriCorps*VISTA Summer Associate I assisted in the process for Elon to become an affiliate site of the Campus Kitchens Project. Much to my delight, we opened the Campus Kitchen at Elon University (CKEU) in the spring of 2011. During this time of planning, and eventually opening CKEU, my reason for service changed again. It became more about direct service and meeting our own community where it is by using resources available on Elon’s campus. My vision became more about bringing people together to provide an essential need.
As CKEU goes into its second year I am realizing how much indirect and direct service can make an impact and how essential both of these components of service are to each other. While I still consider myself and advocate and activist, I have laid down the pamphlets and posters and picked up a spoon. I now teach people about issues such as hunger and homelessness by setting them up to do some direct service with the Campus Kitchen at Elon University. I serve because I believe in talk and action.