Alpha Phi Omega's second annual Do Your Service Day, dedicated to community service projects such as the Help the Homeless Walk, planting trees in Crestwood Park and the Miss Wheelchair D.C. Pageant, began on Friday night and lasted through Sunday morning.
Annie Ehrlich, creator of Do Your Service Day and a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said the idea behind the event is to have the co-ed community service fraternity doing community service at all times for 24 hours straight.
The event started with two brothers spending the night at the Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church, home of the Metrohouse program. The program provides four homeless people at a time with a place to sleep. They also can eat breakfast and dinner, bathe and do laundry.
Kat Schroeder, APO's alumni chair and a senior in the Kogod School of Business and the School of International Service, heated up soup made by a member of the church and distributed it there.
"You just hang out and chat with the guests, and we brought a movie over to watch with them," Schroeder said.
Meredith Eddins, a sophomore in CAS, teamed with another member of her pledge class to get people involved in bagging food for the homeless.
"We were asked to come up with projects, and I'd heard about this being done before, so we put it together," Eddins said while waiting for another APO brother to arrive with more bread to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to fill the brown bags.
Lina Kim, chair of Do Your Service Day, also known as "D-Day," bagged food for the homeless.
"We hand out the bags around Dupont, the National Mall and Union station," Kim said. "We go directly to the homeless, to people who can't get to a shelter or for whom the shelters are too full."
With many volunteer options, some brothers volunteered the entire day.
Dorothy Mejia, a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs, said she started her participation in the Letts/Anderson quad at 11 p.m. Friday by passing out water to people returning from parties, an event her fellow APO member Alyssa Klein, a senior in SIS, said they described with the slogan, "Keep Campus Beautiful - Don't Throw Up." This event ended at 2 a.m.
At 8 a.m., Mejia was in the Letts/Anderson quad ready to meet brothers and plant trees. After that event and a quick shower, she went up to the Anderson 6 South Lounge to bag food for the homeless until 5 p.m., she said.
Ehrlich said she was impressed with the progress Do Your Service Day has made since she created it last year.
"I had the idea because service is a personal passion of mine and I wanted to ignite that in others, and the best way to do that is to give people a dare or a challenge or a goal," she said. "And this year, even alumni and abroad people are participating. We have people across the world doing community service"
