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Pepperdine Links
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Melissa Overbeck
Assistant Perspectives
Editor
Step Forward Day can be summed up in four words — great idea, poor implementation.
No one wants to be the person to criticize something as well-intentioned as Step Forward Day: after all, how can the school go wrong with a day designed to get students out of Pepperdine’s protective bubble and give back to the community?
The problem is that Step Forward Day is not a “day” of service. Rather, it would be more truthful to call the event Step Forward Hour, because that’s about how long the service projects last.
The rest of the day is a colossal waste of time. Students arrive at 7 a.m. in order to stand around and eat university-provided breakfast (usually bagels and cream cheese) and wait in long lines to get free T-shirts. The rest of the morning includes an assembly in the amphitheater followed by more waiting as groups organize and wait for University vans to bring them to their places of service. By the time students arrive at their locations, it’s often past 10 a.m. and with the “day of service” set to end with a barbecue at noon, little time is left for actual service.
The service part also leaves serious room for improvement. While some locations and projects are helpful and productive, many seem rather pointless. My first year, for example, my dorm got sent to pick up trash at Westward Beach. While there’s nothing wrong with picking up trash, the day went to waste because there was no trash on the beach — the school was unaware that another organization was and is paid to collect trash there on a regular basis. Other projects have included helping at a Malibu elementary school and helping to make a trail in the hills of Malibu.
While these activities are helpful, they are not where the greatest needs are in our community. The school’s proximity to Los Angeles provides a number of service opportunities in areas that desperately need assistance.
Pepperdine has an amazing resource available to it on Step Forward Day — more than 1000 people willing to serve — but it fails to take advantage of that resource. Why send students to collect trash at the beach in Malibu when you could send them to do a project that would make a huge impact on someone’s life?
Malibu is only 20 minutes from L.A., but it is a drastically different world. Here, we rarely see people struggling to make ends meet and it’s easy to forget that a different kind of life exists. Step Forward Day is the perfect opportunity for students to step out of their comfort zones and experience the city. L.A. has a multitude of service opportunities — homes that need repair, kids that need tutors and role models, shelters that need a couple extra hands to serve lunch — these are all things that Pepperdine students could easily do. Instead, Step Forward Day allows students to stay in the protective bubble of Malibu and its surrounding area.
Forget breakfast, T-shirts and waiting around. What if students arrived at 9 a.m. for the Step Forward Day program, and by 9:30 a.m. were on busses to L.A. or the few places in Malibu where they could really make a difference? What if the program lasted until 3 p.m. so students would have a solid block of time to actually accomplish a meaningful task? What kind of impact could Pepperdine make by sending a thousand volunteers into the city? If Pepperdine took advantage of this opportunity, Step Forward Day would change lives.
Submitted 09-09-2004
MALIBU, CA
