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Get Involved!

Trinity’s Office of Community Service and Civic Engagement provides students with opportunities to get involved in a wide variety of different organizations. For more information about these groups, contact the student leader, Lindsey Eichler '08, Graduate Assistant (lindsey.eichler@trincoll.edu or x2383) or Joe Barber, Director (joseph.barber@trincoll.edu or x4256).

Civic Involvement and Community Building

Adopt-a-Platoon
Contact: Allie Siraco ’11 (alessandra.siraco@trincoll.edu)
Adopt a Platoon began in the fall of 2008, and focuses on writing letters to soldiers overseas.  The organization Adopt a Platoon is a national one (www.adoptaplatoon.org), and Trinity’s Adopt a Platoon gets names of soldiers from it and uses them to write to soldiers stationed everywhere around the globe. Our goal is to give soldiers a little something from home, even if just for a moment during their days.

Annual Community Events Staff (ACES)

Contact:  trinaces@gmail.com

ACES runs most of the major annual community service events on campus, including Halloween on Vernon Street, Thanksgiving Food Basket Drive, Sponsor-A-Snowman, Hartford Interval House Holiday Party, Annual Auction for Charity, Souper Bowl, and Fun Fair.

Connecticut Public Interest Research Group (ConnPIRG)

• Global Warming Solutions
• Health Care Initiatives
• Hunger and Homelessness
• Student Debt
• Transportation

Contact: Jess Cote (jessica.cote@trincoll.edu)

Trinity's local chapter of the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group (ConnPIRG), as part of the larger US Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), works to make social change based on current public interests at a local, national and global scale.  This nonprofit activist organization chooses the most pressing social matters for campaigns each year. ConnPIRG at Trinity educates students on these particular issues, sends advocates to the state governmental level, and hosts events to raise awareness among students on campus. At Trinity, the organization's work includes educating students on alternative energy and conservation, both sides of the debate on health care and why it matters to us as students, how our public transit system could be improved, and the ways we as a student body can contribute to alleviating hunger and homelessness. 

Fred Pfeil Community Project (The Fred)

Contact: Ryan Haney ’09 (ryan.haney@trincoll.edu) and Sean Zimmer (sean.zimmer@trincoll.edu)

Begun at the start of the 2006-2007 academic year, the Fred Pfeil Community Project is a student-run campus living alternative named after beloved Professor of English, Fred Pfeil, who died of cancer in December 2005.  The purpose of The Fred is to create a comfortable and vibrant space for all students to unite social, cultural, and intellectual interests, thereby enriching campus life. Housed in Summit East residence hall, the Fred sponsors weekly Friday night social events (e.g., open mic nights, art openings, movies, improvisational theater, etc.) and about a dozen theme groups, which include a wide range of academic and cultural topics, including feminism, hip-hop, spirituality, radical politics, current events, Scrabble, and cultural awareness.  Each member is expected to be an active member in one of these themes, in addition to being a generally active presence in the Fred community.

Friends Active in Civic Engagement and Service (FACES)

Contact:  Lindsey Eichler, Graduate Assistant (lindsey.eichler@trincoll.edu)

FACES is comprised of representatives from all the groups on campus who participate in some sort of community service or civic engagement work, the purpose of which is to provide student groups committed to service a place to meet, learn, and collaborate with each other.

PRAXIS

Contacts:  PRAXIS Coordinator, Gina Filloramo ’10 (gina.filloramo@trincoll.edu)
PRAXIS is a residence-based community service program established by and for students with the purpose of creating an environment that actively promotes and engages students in community involvement and building within the residence hall, on campus, and with the Hartford community. Students are housed together in Doonesbury and are expected to do at least 3 hours of community service a week. Applications for PRAXIS are available every spring semester.

Environment and Transportation

Green Campus

Contact: Giuliani Lopez (guiliani.lopez@trincoll.edu)

Green Campus is dedicated to making Trinity a “greener” place and hence a good neighbor.  Green Campus is dedicated to raising awareness about College’s environmental impacts and to undertake initiatives to reduce the impact.  In this vein, Green Campus works on improving College recycling (new outdoor recycling bins on campus and a new website created about recycling), reducing food waste in the College cafeteria (Project Clean Plate), salvaging items disposed of by students at the end of the academic year (Dump and Run), buying “green” energy for special days at the College, planting trees, introducing locally-grown food in the College dining halls (see “Food” section below), and advocating for policies to make Trinity a more environmentally conscious campus.

U-Pass

Human Rights

Activists for Southeast Asia

Contact: Elizabeth O'Connell '10 (elizabeth.oconnell@trincoll.edu)
Although in the past the group has focused on different countries in Southeast Asia, recently all efforts have gone towards Myanmar (Burma) since the junta's harsh crackdown on the Monks' protest of 2007.  After this uprising there was a flood of refugees who left the region, and several families relocated to Hartford.  ASEA teaches one of these refugee families English, and has held clothing drives for them as well.  The group also hosts a biannual fundraiser, Boogie for Burma, to raise money for a clinic on the Thai-Burmese border.  This year we will earmark our donation to buy medical supplies.

Amnesty International

Contact: Mary Morr '12 (mary.morr@trincoll.edu)
Amnesty International promotes all of the rights guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through education and outreach. The Trinity College chapter serves this goal by educating the student body about worldwide rights-related events through a biweekly newsletter and a monthly movie series, urging political leaders to take action through letter-writing campaigns, and raising money to aid victims of human rights violations. Amnesty International also works closely with the other organizations at Trinity that deals with specific human rights campaigns, such as The Darfur Coalition and Feminists United.
In the 2008-2009 school year, Amnesty International focused on health care rights in America. Volunteers and members of the organization went door to door in Connecticut communities and successfully petitioned the passage of the Sustinet health care reform bill. This year, Amnesty is focusing on the issues women's rights, the crisis in Darfur, child soldiers, and human trafficking.

Darfur Coalition

Contact: Michael Schlesinger (michael.schlesinger@trincoll.edu)

The Darfur Coalition came together during the 2004-2005 academic year to raise awareness on campus of and affect change around the issue of what is generally agreed to be a genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.  Over the past couple of years the Darfur coalition has sponsored lectures and movie screenings, held vigils, conducted letter-writing campaigns, and even raised money for two members of the local Catholic Worker community to travel to Sudan.

In addition to this work, the Darfur Coalition has conducted a college divestment campaign. Through research, meetings with the Secretary of the College, and petition drives, the campaign was a success, and on May 20, 2006, the Trinity College Board of Trustees voted unanimously in favor of a policy of divestment of investments in Sudan.  A second resolution was approved by the Trustees at their December meeting that addressed some problems in the first resolution, and, in so doing, more fully affirmed the spirit of that initial resolution, and ultimately resulted in the divestment of Trinity’s Sudan-related investments by April 2007.

Intellectual Disabilities and Youth

Best Buddies

Contact: Shana Conroy (trinitybestbuddies@gmail.com)