When I came to Columbia, I did not expect that service would play a large role in my collegiate experience. I had volunteered in high school for a peer tutoring program and worked with another group that provided services to the children of incarcerated women. But in all honesty, my participation in those organizations was one part good intentions, one part résumé-padding for college applications, and one part the simple fact that high school activities do not require huge amounts of time in one’s schedule.
At the activities fair in my freshman year, I, like pretty much every other student at Columbia, signed up for about 40 organizations without any particular thought. During orientation week, as I’m sure you all remember, you don’t have that many friends yet, and you’re a bit taken with all the possible versions of you that could unfold over the four years to come. Among the myriad sheets to which I affixed my signature, I must have signed up for an uncharismatically named organization called Mentor High School Extension.
The only reason I know that I signed up for this group was that a week after the fair I got a call from Sonia Reese, the executive director of Community Impact. She informed me that the organization had no returning members and that I was one of two people who had put their names on its sad recruitment sheet. In other words, if I didn’t agree to coordinate the program, it would cease to exist.
I talked matters over with the other name on the list, Lauri Feldman, who was a sophomore at the time and a complete stranger to me. We decided to give coordinating the program a go. It was an opportunity to build an organization of our own, and if we failed, the program would only meet the fate for which it was otherwise destined. While somewhat skeptical about our outlook, Community Impact was incredibly supportive, providing the infrastructure and funding that we needed to reboot the program.
Playing expert on an organization we knew nothing about, an organization that did not even properly exist yet, Lauri and I assembled a motley group of 15 Columbians to mentor high school students from the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. We did not know how things would go. And then we met the students. They were some of the nicest, hardest working kids that I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet—the type of people that I was friends with when I was in high school. Knowing them raised the stakes—we needed this program to succeed because we didn’t want to let them down.
Over the next three years, we built ourselves up from a fragile organization with nothing more than the skeleton structure of a partnership between Community Impact, the New York City Department of Education, and the Manhattan Center into a robust group of 25 mentor-student pairs. We have developed a strong calendar of academic and cultural events, ranging from sessions with Columbia alumni to college essay-writing workshops to trips to Columbia sports games and Broadway shows.
We’ve done this all with a generous, but certainly not gaudy, budget. One of the main takeaways I have from the experience is that you can accomplish a lot as a Columbia student group without enormous funding. In planning events, the Columbia name itself is very powerful. Mention that you are a Columbia organization, and you will get speakers, discounted books, discounted food, and free or discounted tickets. People believe in this university and are eager to help its students in their service endeavors.
Almost four years after rebooting the program, I am now preparing to leave it as I approach graduation. It’s probably the part of my Columbia experience about which I feel the best—the one that I am most clearly leaving in better shape than I found it. When you commit so much time and work to an organization, making plans for its future is as important as any other involvement you’ve had with it. Last year, we started bringing on new coordinators so that they can take the foundations we’ve laid and hopefully expand them into something ever more exciting. At the very least, we’re leaving them with a better name. I think Mentoring Youth in New York City (My NYC) would have gotten more than two names on its sign-up sheet. At least, I hope.
The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in economics.
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