Hendricks Chapel brings the Syracuse community together on campus. But Syeisha Byrd, the chapel’s director of engagement programs, also works to get students off campus and into the greater Syracuse area.

Before her role at Hendricks, Byrd worked as the director at Syracuse’s Central Village Boys and Girls Club. Her commitment to serving the Syracuse community fuels her to help SU students cultivate a similar passion.

Byrd helps coordinate various community engagement opportunities, including Young Scholars and Empathy Matters. She said students identify problems in the city that they want to help with, and then she guides them to an opportunity that best fits them.

“A lot of the students are students that are searching to belong somewhere and they find us,” Byrd said.

After students volunteer with local organizations, Byrd hosts group dinners so they can reflect on their experiences and learn from each other. The students often realize how much they, too, benefit from the work they do, Byrd said.

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On the other side of campus, Pamela Heintz, associate vice president and director of the Shaw Center at SU, is also working to connect students with service opportunities. While Byrd’s efforts are helping students independently give back, Heintz works with students for credit and class requirements.

The Shaw Center, founded in 1994, started with one intern, Heintz said. Today, there are 35 to 40 interns per semester who work on a variety of volunteer initiatives. The center caters to students looking for service projects as part of an academic requirement. For students in the Renée Crown University Honors Program, community service is a requirement. The honors program at SU recorded 17,200 service hours in the 2017-18 academic year — nearly 2,000 more than the previous year.

For students with a particular passion project in mind, they head over to the Office of Student Activities in Schine Student Center. Students can then apply to start their own service organizations with the help of Sarah Cappella, associate director of the OSA. Cappella works with students to ensure they can sustain their organization in the long term.

Each new group must be approved by a board of students, so students put together a presentation and proposal packets with information to back up their organization, Cappella said. Since the process takes more than a month between applying and approval, Cappella said she encourages students to see what other service groups are already in motion and if their missions overlap.

“The application packet and the process takes a long time to do,” Cappella said. “It’s not something really that you can put together overnight.”

SU has 24 student service organizations listed on OrgSync, and this number does not include programs run by the Shaw Center or SU’s colleges.

For students, the services provided by Hendricks and the Shaw Center are great options for getting involved, said Greg Mytelka, chair of community engagement for SU’s Student Association.

Published on November 7, 2018 at 9:22 pm

Contact Alex: ajrouhan@syr.edu