Thousands of UCLA students Blanket City for Volunteer Day

Excerpts from article by Alison Hewitt: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/4-600-blanket-city-for-volunteer-10...

In what is believed to be the nation's largest-ever university-organized volunteer day, an army of 4,300 UCLA freshmen and transfer students, the size of a NATO brigade, fanned out across Los Angeles on Tuesday, September 22 to make the city a better place. For UCLA's first Volunteer Day, nearly 1,000 students began trail repair at Griffith Park, 1,000 more tackled beach clean-up at Point Dume in Malibu, and about 500 each beautified the Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles and five Los Angeles Unified School District campuses.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who has made volunteerism a priority since taking the reins in 2007, was joined by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles to applaud the 600 Bruins blanketing the campus. They scurried across the asphalt, repainting basketball court outlines and giving buildings a new coat of paint. (Watch the video)

"This is an opportunity right at the get-go to say, 'Service is important at UCLA,'" Block said. "UCLA Volunteer Day is an affirmation of UCLA's obligation, as a public university, to serve the community ... It's an opportunity for our students to help out, but hopefully it's just the beginning of a year long of service."

All together, the 4,300 students, joined by 300 staff, faculty, alumni and older undergraduates who served as task captains, slathered on 555 gallons of paint, planted dozens of trees at schools, restored trails at Griffith Park, rebuilt fences at Point Dume and more. Across the 26 different work sites, the people who care for the campuses and parks on a daily basis told the students how much the work meant.

Volunteer Day was organized in partnership with L.A. Works, a volunteer action center that links volunteers to service opportunities, and sponsored by the Entertainment Industry Foundation, Hollywood's leading charitable organization, which provided a $250,000 grant. UCLA's new Volunteer Center, which officially launched just 24 hours before Volunteer Day, is funded by The UCLA Foundation.

Photos and tweets about Volunteer Day poured in from students, staff and faculty all morning, making hundreds of details available on Twitter at #uclavol and creating an ever-growing Flickr photo page and an interactive photo-map.

http://volunteer.ucla.edu