Spring Storm

About 1,000 people woke up before 10 a.m. Saturday for the ASUNM Community Experience’s Spring Storm event.
Spring Storm, which coincides with the Fiestas event every year, is a community-service initiative that sends UNM students all over town to work on various projects.

Maggie Merrigan, communications director for ASUNM Community Experience, said CE organizes the event and finds projects where students can serve the community.

“Different groups around campus, as well as individual groups, sign up to do projects for us throughout the day, and we find 50, 60 projects throughout the Albuquerque area for them to do,” she said.

Jennifer Hill, who participated in the event, said she was impressed by the number of people that showed up.
“I think they said it was over a thousand. It was the biggest it’s ever been, supposedly,” she said. “Some groups would go around and pick up trash on campus. Our group had to go to this facility for kids with disabilities and clean the windows there. There were a ton of windows, so we did that.”

The variety of projects ranged from dog walking to working with senior citizens, Merrigan said.
“People went to the South Valley to do projects for senior citizens that can’t do as much,” she said. “Some groups go out there and help walk dogs and move ‘em around and stuff. (Students) didn’t have to look for the projects. We found the projects for them.”

Most students got involved through groups such as fraternities and sororities, said Monique Johnson, a member of co-ed fraternity Phi Sigma Pi.

“We volunteer every year to be a part of Spring Storm, because one of our pillars is service,” she said. “We went to the Alta Mira (Specialized Family Services) Center, and we actually helped the janitor out. It’s a pretty big building. It has about three or four buildings connected to it. We did his windows for him. A lot of them were water-damaged and hadn’t been cleaned in a while.”

Johnson said she thinks the school should do more to involve individuals, since most of the people who came to Spring Storm were affiliated with a campus group.

“It’s group based. Individuals can participate, but UNM doesn’t really make that apparent,” she said. “UNM always has groups join, but the individual thing is not big. I think they should stress that more … The more people that volunteer, the more we can get done.”