For most students, spring break is a week without classes, with some fun and relaxation thrown in. For the 90 Cornell students who participated in the Alternative Breaks program, the week was also chock-full of intensive community service learning.

In 10 years, the program has grown from one to 13 sites that host teams of five to eight students. The teams partner with local organizations that address such social issues as poverty, homelessness, racism and domestic violence. Some groups worked in New York, such as Lake Placid or New York City, but other students traveled as far as West Virginia and Florida.

"The mission of the Alternative Breaks program is to promote service learning through direct public service with communities to heighten social awareness, enhance personal growth and advocate lifelong social action," said Joyce Muchan of the Cornell Public Service Center, which oversees the trips.

"It's difficult to commit to volunteering during the school year, but this program gives you a whole week to make a significant impact with your work," said Carlie Arbaugh '13, who worked with the New York Horticultural Society in New York City, helping a church, a food pantry and a low-income housing complex prepare and plant urban gardens. The aim is to increase the quantity of fresh food in poorer urban areas and help combat high rates of obesity.

"I didn't know too much about gardening, but as a human biology, health and society major, I'm very interested in nutrition, so working with these groups tied into my own studies," Arbaugh said.

Participants focus strongly on the service learning component of the trips. "We spend months before the trip preparing, working and learning about what the agency does," said Kristen Kennedy '10, an agricultural sciences major and president of the Alternative Breaks student group.

Once students are assigned to a trip in November, each team meets weekly to review the curriculum for each site and readings on the social issues they'll be encountering, Kennedy said. The students also attend seminars on conflict management and the benefits and processes of reflection, and engage in a nightly reflection activity during the trip. Participants also write a reflection paper about their experience.

"It was really the learning aspect that drew me into the program," said Lee-Ann Lugg '10, a human biology, health and society major who participated last year and was a trip leader this year. Her team worked with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, an agency that works to get living wages, health care and affordable housing for Philadelphia residents. Before the trip, her team discussed stereotypes about homelessness and read articles about health care accessibility.

"When I thought about shelters before the trip, I saw it as, 'OK, this person is homeless, but now they're in a shelter so they have taken care of that problem,'" Lugg said. "But going on the trip has showed me that they haven't, because a shelter is only a temporary solution."

Arbaugh added, "I made connections with people at all the places we were working, and it was nice to realize we had a lot in common and to really break down the stereotypes I had."

The drug- and alcohol-free trips are not all about service, though. Arbaugh said her group worked during the day and explored New York City in the evenings. "We did tourist things, like visiting the Museum of Modern Art and walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, and all six New York City groups went to a Broadway show together," she said.

The trips are funded in part by the Student Assembly Finance Committee, fundraising efforts and the individual participants.

Graduate student Sarah Perdue is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.