About 70 students/partners participated in Fuqua’s first annual Gandhi Day on Wednesday, October 3. Gandhi Day is a day of service where students go out into the community to give back for a few hours to really “Be the Change.” Bloggers Diana Yarmovich and Dipesh Shah both participated in the day.

Fuqua organized many volunteer opportunities including ones with:

Durham Food Bank

Habitat for Humanity

TROSA

CAARE Inc.

Triangle Rails to Trails Conservatory

More details on two of the projects:

Durham Food Bank

By Diana Yarmovich

When I learned of this opportunity, I was excited to participate and saw it as a great way to give back to the Durham community in honor of Gandhi and his lasting influence.

I spent the day volunteering at the Durham Food Bank. Right away, the food bank provided an overview of their operations to the 11 volunteers. The food bank serves 6 counties and over 93,000 people.We had a chance to ask questions about the logistics and partnership organizations (the business side) and the impact on the families and individuals (the personal side). Then we got down to business! We packed over 1,500 pounds of pasta. We had a steady operation going — labeling bags, filling bags with dry pasta, tying pasta bags, and redo! Just imagine a box of 500 pounds of dry pasta — and think that we emptied 3 of them!

After our morning of service, all of the volunteers from the different sites came back to Fuqua for a lunch that featured a presentation and discussion about our day of service and Gandhi’s influence.

For me, it provided a chance to step out of the Fuqua bubble and put things in perspective. In my business school world, I often forget about how fortunate I am and spending my morning at the Durham Food Bank was a great reminder to not only think about how lucky I am, but also think about how impactful this organization is on so many people’s lives.

TROSA

By Dipesh Shah

I spent the morning working at the TROSA site. TROSA is an innovative, multi-year residential program that enables substance abusers to be productive. The organization helps recovering individuals by providing comprehensive treatment, work-based vocational training, education, and continuing care. I chose TROSA because I utilized their moving services earlier this year when I moved apartments in Durham, and I was SO impressed with the level of service from the wonderful folks who work with this organization. Therefore, I knew this would be the place for me to “be the change.”

As part of our work, we pressure washed and pretreated a large portion of the outside building. TROSA was going to paint an exterior wall but it needed a little tender, love, and care before painting. It was a tough job in muggy weather, but and my fellow 20+ team members and I did a great job. We got the wall as clean as we could.

This volunteer experience was awesome. It was great to take a break from all the busy things that we get involved in and actually take a moment and make a small impact on the world.

More photos on Facebook.