Alternative Spring Breaks fill school breaks with service and stress relief

This spring break, some students will lounge on a beach, while others will build a house.

The latter will be true for College seniors Grace Jemison and Tilyn Bell, co-directors of Alternate Spring Break at Penn. ASB is a national organization with independent, student-run chapters at universities across the country — Penn’s chapter functions through the Civic House — that sends small groups of students to different locations during their spring break, or the last week of winter break, to give back.

Penn’s ASB chapter organizes many of their trips through Habitat for Humanity, but they also have what they call “breakaway” trips, which can include a number of different kinds of volunteer work. This winter a group of students worked to restore trails in Maryville, Tennessee, and another group traveled to Atlanta, Georgia to work at the Atlanta Community Food Bank.

In March, ASB has seven trips planned, all of which were filled long ago when applications were due in the fall. Most trips involve 14 students, two of which are student leaders. Leaders have been on trips before and receive a lot of additional training, and Bell said it’s “really competitive” to become a leader.

“They do a lot of work, they lead the entire trip,” she said.

The trips are competitive in general, shown by the fact that ASB has expanded to seven trips for this upcoming spring break. Jemison said they’ve never calculated their acceptance rate, but they get a lot of applications, and they try to accept people from a variety of backgrounds. She said one of the goals of ASB is “not just to get people who are involved with service and know a lot about social justice but also to build a community from all different parts of Penn.”

An alternate break is a surprisingly cheap spring break option, at $395 for driving trips and $495 for flying trips. This covers housing, transportation and food for the entire week. The organization also provides financial support for students who receive financial aid from Penn, so some students can get their costs lowered even more.

ASB isn’t without an internal mission, either.

Jemison said one goal of the trips is “trying to break down the Penn face,” referencing the phrase students use to describe the cultural phenomenon of Penn students pretending they’re fine when they’re actually feeling stressed or overwhelmed. She said that the community-building that goes on among the students during the trips can be a good antidote.

Jemison and Bell also both acknowledged their awareness that short term volunteer trips, sometimes negatively labeled by activists and the media as “voluntourism,” can be ineffective or even harmful for the people they are trying to serve.

“We’re really trying to work on a more critical approach to the trips,” Jemison said. “Before we go, we do a workshop on power privilege and oppression. What does it mean that we are Penn students who are able to pay for these trips?”

Bell added that the site leaders “have a lot of training about how to be good advocates and responsible citizens when they’re going on these trips so they aren’t causing harm to these communities.”

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