Assignment 2

Last spring I participated for the second time in the Cornell Alternative Spring Break program in a group of 13 Cornell students, including one student who was designated the trip leader. The group that we had all joined was to visit Sylvia’s Place, a New York City-based homeless shelter for LGBTQ youth and offer our services to Sylvia’s Place clients and at the same time learn about the socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological issues behind the LGBTQ homeless population in NYC, comprehensively dubbed “service-learning.” We were allotted two and a half months in second semester (before Spring Break) to prepare for the trip as a group and then six days in NYC to execute our plans—we received funding for the bus ride and five nights hotel. All this comprised the inputs for the Sylvia’s Place trip of 2008, an event that many of us hoped would allow us to become intimate with oft-ignored problems in our immediate society.

During preparation, we were required to attend weekly meetings with the entire group to go discuss readings and videos to help us understand the issues in which we were to be immersed. The proximity of the group during all our activities forced us to establish emotional connections with each other during in discussion and “sharing” games. Due to our large numbers, we were unable to all be in close proximity of every other group member during the trip, and unsurprisingly, the larger group broke up into cliques of mostly 4 or 5 people who tended to discuss and partake in activities together, sometimes creating “factions” as like-minded members naturally drifted towards each other. Debriefings and group discussions were still dictated by the leader but given the size, many group activities such as dinner and sight-seeing were done in our respective small groups.

In terms of outside accomplishments, our group was fairly successful. We were able to help out with a lot of the labor work in getting the newly opened Sylvia’s Place daytime annex set up and running and during our breaks we were able to hang out with the clients that frequented the center so we could forge friendships and understandings with them. However, I very few of our group members came out of the experience feeling satisfied because our leader was uninterested in the subject and limited what interactions we were able to have with the clients.