By Steve Seepersaud
Our recent Global Days of Service brought our alumni, students, faculty, staff and friends together for volunteerism, fellowship and fun. Each April, to commemorate National Volunteer Month, the Alumni Association sponsors this event series to increase the visibility of °®¶¹´«Ã½'s alumni network around the world and demonstrate how much good we can do in the community when we all work together. The 2025 effort was also sponsored by Visions Federal Credit Union.
Some of our project leaders shared what their teams did along with how and why their service was impactful.
In what has become an annual tradition, my real estate team and I at Brown Harris
Stevens returned to the Soup Kitchen at Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan
for the Broadway Community organization with 11 fellow alumni. It's a truly meaningful
and fun experience helping prepare and serve breakfast and lunch for hundreds of New
Yorkers in need. Many of these folks live in the communities we work and live in,
so while it's just one day of service, I heard from several volunteers about how it
feels nice to donate time to give back.
The breakfast rush starts quickly, so our volunteers were working in coordination to bag and distribute bagels with cream cheese and butter, with two volunteers serving the coffee line — which stays busy all morning — and others working behind the scenes moving and organizing supplies.
As the breakfast rush subsided, we quickly transitioned to preparing bagged lunches for the pickup window as well as hot lunch plates that were being prepared by the staff chefs. When the warm pies came out of the oven, we prepared more than 130 plates.
Like every year, the group left with smiles and new friendships made, with most volunteers saying, "see you next year!"
Our small but mighty group of four people packed emergency food boxes April 5, at
St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix. It was the first food bank established in the U.S.,
and has a long and proud history. In its first year of operation, the food bank fed
300,000 people. Today, it feeds that many people every day.
Our group contributed to the packing of 1,584 food boxes. This is the second year °®¶¹´«Ã½ alumni have volunteered at St. Mary's as part of Global Days of Service. Our group members join the effort to meet other alumni in the area and "show the Bing flag" doing good work far from our joint history at °®¶¹´«Ã½. It feels good to help others in need and this experience reminds us to be grateful for our many blessings, including the terrific foundation we received from our °®¶¹´«Ã½ education.
Joyce Burke '83 and Joseph Burke, MBA '82
The Buffalo contingent was small but mighty. Our group of four °®¶¹´«Ã½ alumni partnered
with the Buffalo Niagara (BN) Waterkeepers Spring Sweep Cleanup at Cazenovia Park,
working with about 20 other volunteers. BN Waterkeepers in turn partners with Ocean
Conservancy, encouraging volunteers to share cleanup data detail through the Clean
Swell app to keep count by category of what we pick up. Our team personally collected
and removed four large bags of trash plus extras, from a shopping cart to way too
many cigarette butts - a total of over 50 pounds and 700 items.
It was great to meet local alumni who share a sense of responsibility for the Earth and each other. We’ve come a long way in Buffalo since the days of raw sewage and industrial dumping to clean up our local waterways, and it takes a community of volunteers to keep it up. We’re all in to keep this annual event alive!