2008 Streetfest: to embrace fully.

It all starts at StreetFest, Calvin's annual three-day service orientation for incoming students. When first-year students climb off the buses and put their muscle into stocking food pantries, planting gardens or cleaning streets they get their first taste of the Calvin service-learning experience. StreetFest partners Calvin students and their faculty and staff mentors with over 50 community agencies, organizations and churches in several Grand Rapids neighborhoods. Three days of practical chores in the wider community do more than expose Calvin students to the wider world. StreetFest also strengthens these ongoing partnerships, partnerships in which Calvin students continue to serve.

StreetFest is a small taste of service-learning during first year students' orientation experience at Calvin. Students may work alongside agencies like the Inner City Christian Federation building sheds, sort clothes at Degage Ministries, accompany residents from the Heartland Health Care to the John Ball Park Zoo, or plant a rain garden with the West Michigan Environmental Action Council.   Wherever they go during StreetFest, new Calvin students contribute to work that is already being done in Grand Rapids.   Service-learning is not limited by these places and we want you to know there is more out there.   If you have an interest in a certain area, we can find somewhere for you to serve and learn!

The hope for StreetFest is that it will encourage conversation centered on the importance of place. It is aimed to promote care for place, located within a context of personal relationships and focused on attentiveness to particularity and otherness. In this way, “to embrace fully” serves to emphasize two specific points:

For four years these students will be in a particular place, part of which involves the city of Grand Rapids. StreetFest serves to encourage students to engage the community in which they will be living. To promote interaction, exploration, and celebration! It is my hope that dialogue will encourage an attitude of excitement and a willingness to embrace Grand Rapids fully. Conversation will be aimed to foster consideration for future Service-Learning endeavors, promoting a spirit of openness and thoughtfulness.

The idea “to embrace fully” also refers to the individual student’s role within the larger web of interdependent members. For students to care for place, they must recognize their own position within the community and realize both their voice and responsibility. Acknowledging interconnectedness encourages participation as active citizens. The hope is that this service-learning experience will perpetuate a pattern where students continue to offer themselves to this place, through relationship and care.