College service group helps students give back

Brianna Buch plans to spend her life devoted to the service of others. She also wants to make it as easy as possible for students nationwide to join her.

Buch, a senior at the College of William and Mary, has already compiled a laundry list of international, national and school-specific service-oriented experiences.

Her past five summers were spent working at the U.S. Department of State, including stints at the U.S. Embassy in London. Separately, she has traveled to Ghana as part of projects helping expectant moms and aiding community development. As junior class president at William & Mary, she spearheaded a program to make campus more bike-friendly.

Buch's current project is AskNot, an organization that is "dedicated to creating opportunities for students looking to give back to their community and country."

The group's name is a direct reference to the famous call-to-arms raised by president John F. Kennedy during his 1961 inaugural address -- "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

According to Buch, more than 50 years later, "There are a lot of students who want to serve, but there are not necessarily positions where they are applying. So we are highlighting opportunities that aren’t necessarily those main ones students would know, as well as working with the campus and the community to create more of those positions.”

In the Q&A below, Buch, a public health and economics double-major from Sterling, Va., discusses AskNot in greater detail and also touches on her personal passion for service.

Q: What is AskNot, and what motivated you to start it?

A: AskNot is a grassroots movement started by undergraduates who believe in the power of national service to take back our country from partisan contempt, apathy and immobility. We seek to reimagine the responsibilities of undergraduate students to their communities and to redefine what it means to be a citizen in our country.

We target this population -- the millennials, my peers -- because this generation also expresses a lot of discontent with the traditional career trajectory. Many conversations with my peers about future jobs center on finding meaning and fulfillment beyond just making money. AskNot exists to help them realize this goal in a way that benefits the community as a whole.

Lastly, service is a way to reconnect people across increasing socioeconomic inequality and heal some of the divides we have created in our country. It will be up to our generation to work through these issues, and this is a way each of us can start right now.

Q: What is the early plan for how AskNot will function to accomplish some of these aims?

A: We recognize that there is a large amount of variety between different universities. We want our chapters to take the lead in engaging with their administrators, peers, parents and alumni. AskNot chapters will employ a three-pronged strategy to educate, advocate and change infrastructure on college campuses. They will educate students about existing service opportunities, advocate for more opportunities for students to participate in national service and work within their communities to enact policies that support and encourage student service years at their university.

By the end of our first year in operation, we hope to be present on 20 college campuses on the East Coast. Five years from then, we hope for AskNot to have spread across the country. On the national level, AskNot, in collaboration with other service advocacy groups, hopes to push alumni, universities and the government to create one million service opportunities for young Americans by the end of this decade.

Q: On a more personal level, how did you become passionate about service?

A: The ethos of service is and has been a part of my family for as long as I can remember. The combination of stories about relatives who served in the world wars, and completed practical service in the community growing up deepened this passion. Through service work, I learned and interacted with parts of my community I would not have known otherwise. The more I volunteered through school, church and groups, the more I saw the mutually restorative powers of service. I love former president George H.W. Bush's quote, "What we all seek in life is meaning and adventure. It is through service that we find both."

Service is my passion. I see it as a necessity to ameliorate many systemic issues which plague our country. It is an equalizer, and a way to create dialogue across socioeconomic barriers, which would otherwise keep individuals apart. Service creates connections and fulfills a deep longing for meaning and adventure, which unprecedented numbers of my generation are seeking.

Q: Separately, from your perspective and knowledge base, what is the current state of service among college students and the millennial generation overall?

A: A demonstrated demand for service positions exists in the American youth population. There are 10 times more applicants than positions for national service opportunities like Teach for America and AmeriCorps. Demand exists, and the supply of service positions is slowly expanding to meet this demand -- though it has not kept up. Today, about 80,000 Americans serve through AmeriCorps, a federal program which funds both full and part-time positions. Tens of thousands of other Americans serve through publicly-funded programs that are independent. Current efforts through the National Service Alliance are working to create more positions and options for Americans to serve.

Q: What has been a particularly memorable moment related to getting AskNot off the ground?

A: Coming into senior year, I knew I wanted to spend time working to help my peers get involved in national service. I had been involved with efforts at the university and the community level, but was frustrated at how few youth voices there were in a conversation on youth national service. Through a faculty member, I was connected with two students at Yale, Rishabh Bhandari and JJ Echaniz, who had just started AskNot. Former roommates at Yale, they were both equally passionate about facilitating and creating a common civic experience for all young Americans through service years.

Early this semester, we had a mini-summit discussion on how to turn our passion into action and through this discussion, laid the groundwork for AskNot. We decided that AskNot had to not only harness existing energy on college campuses across the nation but also inspire such energy by raising awareness and advocacy for the power national service can have in repairing and reinvigorating America.

Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he also advises The Hawk student newspaper. He is the author of Journalism of Ideas (Routledge, 2013) and maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters. A complete list of Campus Beat articles is here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.