Trevecca, Nashville characterized by a heart for service

 

Once a year the Trevecca community and neighboring universities come together to celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Since 2009 Nashville universities have been participating in MLK Joint Day of Service, serving throughout the Nashville community.

While inclement weather kept this year’s Joint Day of Service events from happening as planned on Jan. 13, they are being rescheduled. Trevecca has been involved in the longstanding community service project since nearly the beginning. 

Tim Stewart, Belmont’s Director of Service-Learning started the program from a grant offered to colleges. He quickly reached out to other Nashville-area universities.

“I learned of the availability of an MLK Day of Service Grant offered for colleges and universities by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) through North Carolina Campus Compact,” Steward said. “While the grant didn’t stipulate that you had to collaborate with other schools for your project, it seemed to me that it would be a fitting way to honor Dr. King by bringing diverse campuses together. Initially, I reached out to TSU because I had contacts there in their service-learning office. I mentioned the project to a Vanderbilt student that I was meeting with about something else, and he brought a large group from Vanderbilt to join us.”

That invitation was soon extended to Fisk, Meharry, Trevecca, Lipscomb and Nashville State, creating a coalition of public and private schools from various backgrounds.

For Jamie Casler, director of Trevecca’s J.V. Morsch Center of Social Justice and Trevecca representative for MLK Joint Day of Service, working with the greater Nashville community is an important part of the Trevecca mission.

“When we say that we are a Christian university in the heart of Nashville, what does that mean to be a part of the city of Nashville?” he said. “We aren’t just a little campus on the Hill. We want to be global citizens, and I think that’s what liberal arts is all about: creating students to be global citizens.”

Each year a committee of representatives from each university involved in the MLK Joint Day of Service come together to focus on a theme for the event. Organizers say that the issues chosen for the service day are issues that King fought for, reminders of what King started and the fight that must continue.

“The planning committee decides on the theme based on the many great choices of things for which Dr. King stood,” Stewart said. “Unfortunately, many of the things he spoke out about are still issues that face us more than 50 years later. When we received the MLK Day of Service grants, our projects were connected to the required themes of addressing food security and hunger, disaster preparedness and serving veterans. While we weren’t constrained by those needs this year, we included them because they continue to be important issues.”

For Casler, Tennessee is a special place where people have always looked after each other.

“It’s something special about seeing the whole city come together and focus on the needs of others,” Casler said. “As Nashvillians and the Volunteer State, we are living into who we say we are as Tennesseans. It’s kind of neat to live into that history and continue that legacy through acts of service and say, ‘We are a people who give to one another. We are a people who look out for each other.’”

He is excited to see students follow in the footsteps of past generations.

“Even in the civil rights movement we were the first city to pioneer a lot of integration,” Casler said. “Why is that? Because we have always been a city that thinks about others, and we’ve led the way for other states in the South. So, it’s neat to continue that belief.”

Casler says it’s his hope—and that of the MLK Joint Day of Service organizers—for all students participating in service day to understand the importance of serving each other.

“I hope that all of our students will realize that as we are serving each other,” he said. “That not only is it kingdom work, but it’s something that we all should be doing for one another. We should all be working together to advance the community no matter what your background is.”

The events previously scheduled for the Jan. 13 MLK Joint Day of Service event are in the process of being rescheduled, possibly for February or April. More information will be shared when the date is selected.


By Princess Jones
Media contact: Mandy Crow, mmcrow@trevecca.edu, 615-248-1695