In February, I volunteered through the College of Charleston’s Center for Civic Engagement during the CofC Day of Service. During the Day of Service, I volunteered alongside other students for Keep Charleston Beautiful, whose mission is to maintain the beauty of Charleston through education and community involvement. This opportunity came as a chance to become more of an active citizen in the city that I go to college in, which I see as important. Sometimes, it is easy for college students to be trapped in the bubble of their campus, and not engage with the community around them. I wanted to ensure that I was putting my community above myself, at least for one day.

All of the volunteers started off the day on the fourth floor of the Stern Center. Here, members of the Center for Civic Engagement (faculty and students) educated us volunteers on what we were about to do. The Center for Civic Engagement explained that they see this educational aspect of volunteering as extremely vital, because it can be an uninformative experience if the volunteers are unsure of exactly what they are doing for the community. In addition, it is rather insensitive for volunteers to work in a community in which they do not know how exactly their work is necessary. It was explained to us that we would be picking up trash alongside the railroad that runs through Charleston, specifically in the northern part of the peninsula, because there is going to be a bike path constructed in place of the out-of-use railroad tracks. The tracks are being taken off within the next month, so the trash needed to be cleared. The goal here is to maintain a healthy and lively ecosystem around the path, and for the trash to not stop any progress of the construction. After some quick icebreakers to get to know one another, us volunteers took a bus to the northern part of the peninsula to get started.

Once we arrived, we were given vests, gloves, plastic tools to pick up trash, and garbage bags. We spent the day walking around the area, picking up any trash that came into our vision. There was a huge amount of garbage in the area, which got me thinking about why this area is so significantly dirty. I thought about environmental racism and injustice as a possible explanation; the area we were working in was extremely low income and disproportionately minorities. It was not surprising to see that this area of the city is not nearly as prioritized to the local government as the areas that are higher income.

After picking up bags and bags of trash, us volunteers finally got together to reflect on our experience. We concluded a few conflicting thoughts. Although we felt as thought it was good to clean up the area from an environmental standpoint, and to benefit those who live in the community that we cleaned up in, we also recognized as a group that the bike path which we were inherently supporting by cleaning up the area so that the tracks can be ripped will likely pump more attention and wealth into the neighborhood we were in, and will potentially displace those who currently live there, and jentrify the area. We wanted to make sure our service was worthy, but also wanted to recognize that not every situation is perfect.