One Day Events

One-Day Outreach Events—Opportunities for Weekend Volunteering

• Red Cross blood drives
• Habitat for Humanity work days
• All-Out Adventures: recreation with special-needs individuals
• Connecticut River Clean-up
• NMH Idol—United Way event
• Kozol’s Kids Coffee House
• Elementary school fairs and work days
• Winter Wonderland Fair for charity fundraising
• Jingle Bell Run
• Homeless Candlelight Vigil
• Hunger Weekend—Hunger Concert and Walk for Hunger Boston
• Special Olympics play days and tournaments
• “Hogger Action” Service Day

All-School Service Day
The entire NMH student body and faculty join in an array of service activities. All other school commitments are suspended from noon to 5 pm. Activities include the following:

For the Empty Bowls Hunger Project, more than 100 students made and glazed ceramic bowls to be sold during Parent and Family Days weekends. An educational speaker from the Food Bank of Western MA spoke to each work group about hunger in our local area and the country. The fall sale brought in $437 for the Food Bank and local Community Meals Program.

A bloodmobile set up outside the Blake Student Center received an overwhelming number of donors.

Students made a Names Quilt panel with the Boston Names Project coordinator, who spoke about AIDs in the US while they sewed. The panel made by NMH students will travel to different cities in the US and Africa with the Names Project displays.

Service fairs in Blake and Tracy Student Centers hosted 25 agencies and service projects with activities such as arranging thank-you bouquets for staff, assembling care packages for a local homeless shelter, and gathering school supplies for a Honduras children’s project. Also at the fair were musicians singing songs of service and activism.

Many groups planted mums and spring bulbs on campus and in local parks, and picked up trash along streets and the banks of the Connecticut River.

Charity car washes raised money for Operation Happy Birthday, an outreach project for local shelter and foster children.

Students painted the new storefront for a local food pantry, while others cooked food to be served at the Community Meals sites. Hundreds of pounds of emergency canned foods were collected to stem the local food pantry shortage.