“Hello, President Wilson,” Devon Anderson hollered Saturday afternoon, standing waist deep in peonies, waving at the University of Akron’s new leader with hedge clippers in one hand and a fistful of withered perennials in the other.
Matthew Wilson, days after being named UA’s new president, walked toward Anderson and other UA student volunteers, with his wife and two teenage sons at his side.
“What can we do to help?” Wilson asked, surveying the wilted flower beds around them in Stan Hywet Hall’s Great Garden, a 2½-acre wonderland of warm weather blooms done in by October chill.
They were there to work, joining more than 1,000 UA students, faculty and staff who fanned out across Akron on Saturday as part of national Make a Difference Day. This marked the 12th year the school participated in the annual service day and estimated volunteers had given 25,548 hours of service to local nonprofits, the equivalent of $207,000 worth of minimum-wage work.
Among other things Saturday: UA’s softball team returned to the Willard United Church of Christ to landscape, paint and clean; students repacked frozen meat at the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank; and students on campus made Christmas tree ornaments to send to U.S. soldiers serving abroad.
At Stan Hywet, some students helped carry dozens of artificial Christmas trees out of storage for the upcoming Deck the Hall festival. But most, including Wilson and his family, worked along horticulturalists to chop down perennials and tidy up planting beds for winter.
Wilson — who last week moved from interim UA president to permanent — said Saturday it’s important to lead by example, and hoped others might try volunteering if they saw him giving his time.
He learned community service through church and Boy Scouts while growing up in Utah, Wilson said. At 13, for his Eagle Scout project, he worked with an audiologist to open a local hearing clinic. At the clinic, a family was surprised to learn their preschool-aged daughter had a hearing problem.
It changed the girl’s life, Wilson said, because her family was able to get her help years before they likely would have discovered the problem.
“Once you start giving, you start seeing the good it does,” he said.
The millennial generation — those born between 1980-2000 — sometimes get a bad rap for being entitled, but not with Stan Hywet’s volunteer coordinator, Jamie Hale, a member of Generation X.
“They know so much outside of their area of study and they’re so hard working, I sometimes have to tell them to slow down,” Hale said Saturday.
She wondered if college-age millennials may volunteer because many were required to do community service to graduate from high school.
UA student Bailey Fries, working in the peonies alongside her Kappa Kappa Gamma sister Devon Anderson, said she volunteers because of what her parents taught her growing up in Canton.
“They kept me humble. They made me work for things,” she said.
“But I also know I’m very privileged. I go to school, I’m in a sorority,” Fries said. “I’m lucky and it’s the right thing to give back.”
Saturday marked Megan Vermillion’s fifth Make a Difference Day with UA. The 25-year-old graduate student, who works in the school’s Department of Student Life, said millennials want to change the world.
Can they do it?
“I hope so,” Vermillion said. “We really want to make a difference.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.