Student Government promises 1M service hours for fundraiser

Student Government announced Friday it would donate one million hours of community service to Boston University.

The pledge comes as part of a donation to the Campaign for BU, said SG President Dexter McCoy.

“What [students] don’t have is money,” McCoy, a College of Communication junior, said. “But what we do have is time, and so we’re looking at what we can do to participate to give back to our university. Service is at the center of what we’re all about as a student body, so that’s how we came about with this.”

The Campaign for BU is a campus-wide, five-year fundraising project with a goal of $1 billion. It was kicked off Friday night to coincide with Alumni Weekend.

“We officially announced this Friday night at a private event with university trustees, faculty and some of the biggest donors to the university,” McCoy said.

SG will collaborate with various student leaders and the Community Service Center to mobilize students and collect hours.

“They [The CSC] have avenues already set in place to count hours, to facilitate service like this, and so we worked with them starting at the end of last year,” McCoy said. “What we’ve done is we’ve put together a community of students who are involved.”

A member of the CSC could not be reached by press time.

He said BU would consider each hour as a donation of minimum hourly wage of $8 per hour to incorporate the service pledge into the fundraising campaign.

“The Board of Trustees loved the idea and agreed to count our hours that we contribute as students as minimum wage gift towards the university’s campaign,” McCoy said. “So if you calculate that, a million hours at minimum wage would be about $8 million that we will have contributed as a student body.”

McCoy said he is confident that students will perform enough hours of community service to fulfill the donation. However, he said the challenge will be successfully monitoring and recording the hours students perform.

“We have created a platform to do that online where students can go in and log their hours as they come about,” McCoy said. “They can log them online and track them that way. We’ve also gotten our hands on a mobile application, pretty much the same way that you check in on FourSquare you can check in your hours.”

McCoy said various student leaders and the CSC will help gather and encourage more students to donate in addition to the students who already donate.

“We have put together a steering committee which is comprised of membership from each of the four classes,” he said. “That steering committee will be charged with going out to clubs and organizations, different student groups [and] speaking with different students across campus.”

McCoy said the steering committee will eventually include members of graduate schools, and the committee will encourage students who already contribute to track their hours.

“Beyond that we want to encourage them to put in a little more hours and encourage them to do that,” he said. “SG itself is committing itself to getting out and driving this message too of philanthropy in general.”

McCoy said any type of community service is encouraged.

“We just want students to do whatever it is that they’re passionate about and improve someone else’s life through their passion by community service itself,” he said. “There isn’t one particular service.”

The donation was inspired by the student body’s gift to BU President Robert Brown at his inauguration in 2005, McCoy said.

“[They] had committed 41,000 hours of community service to the president,” he said. “But something like this in terms of service being given to raise money has never been done here or on any university’s campus anywhere in the world, so we’re really the first to embrace this concept.”