Kelsey Mix – Online Editor/Copy Editor
When December rolls around at Southern, you’re reminded of the holiday season and one of SCSU’s biggest community service events, Friends of Rudolph. The daylong event provides toys, snacks, and Christmas cheer to families all around New Haven from the comfort of our very own Adanti Student Center.
Sal Rizza, the associate director of student life, looks at this as Southern’s best event of the year, “Friends of Rudolph is a Toys for Tots type program that we’ve been doing at Southern for over 20 years.”
“It’s a collaborative program with the New Haven Police Department,” said Rizza. “The New Haven Police focus on informing the community and inviting the community to participate in the program.”
The New Haven Police have a huge part in this event every year. Rizza explained that they also collect toy donations and they work with the Christopher Martins Road Race, which is one of the ways they collect toy donations.
“A very important component to the success of this event is the New Haven Police. They are amazing with this event,” said Rizza. “They have a difficult enough job as it is, but I never once felt like this was work for them.”
Marcus D’Iorio, senior and SCSU student volunteer, helped coordinate the entire event this past Sunday. “Every year we bring in around 1,200 students from the New Haven community to give them a holiday gift,” said D’Iorio. “A lot of the students we bring in aren’t able to afford a holiday gift or have a great holiday season and we’re trying to make it the best that we can.”
D’Iorio also mentioned that it’s a great way to give back to the New Haven community because they allow us to be here and have our campus within their community. One of the activities included some crafts up in the ballroom and there was a slight change to the arts and crafts plan. “We changed up all the crafts this year,” said D’Iorio, “we’re going to be making candy cane reindeer, reindeer bags, and activity books.”
Annette Hailer, junior and service commissioner at SCSU, helped out a lot with planning the event. The Service Commission, or Service Team, on campus has assisted D’Iorio and other student volunteers in planning the event. “They get a snack, they get brought upstairs to do crafts, and they get a gift,” said Hailer. “We went out with SGA [Student Government Association] and purchased a whole bunch of toys for the kids.”
With a huge event like this, a massive amount of planning needs to happen months in advance for everything to go smoothly. “RHA is involved, they help fund it big time,” said Hailer. “Volunteers are pulled from all of the big organizations on campus. So volunteers for the day will be pulled from ProCon [Programs Council], Service Commission, RHA, [and] Greek Life.”
“They try to pull people who they know will be good with kids,” said Hailer. “It’s a hard event to do because it’s a long day and a lot of kids that come through.”
The reins were passed this year while planning the events, D’Iorio said. “Student Government actually transitioned everything from internal with us and we moved it over to the Service Commission. This is kind of our last year being more hands on.”
D’Iorio said they’ll be gearing up next year to take it on big time, but their volunteerism this year has been amazing. “We can’t do it without the Office of Student Life and Residence Life, they provide so much. As well as various clubs and organizations that come to the committee meetings.”
With so many great contributions and elements to Friends of Rudolph, it’s hard to choose a favorite component of the event. “There’s different layers of it, I can’t give just one reason,” said Rizza. “From my place at the university, I just love the fact that it’s one of our stronger traditions that we do and it’s one of our stronger community service efforts.”
“You can see how the community members and our students are really enjoying the day with each other,” said Rizza. “This is a service event that also combines with the spirit of the holiday season.”
Rizza really appreciates the enthusiasm of the student volunteers on the day of the event. “They might be exhausted but I think they feel good at the end of the day working with the kids that are coming in,” said Rizza. “Gifts are gifts. The real magic is that there’s this feeling of happiness throughout the student center.”
Friends of Rudolph is an event that touches the hearts of not only the community, but the volunteers as well. D’Iorio also expressed why he loves this event so much, “It’s one of those events that I look forward to every year because you get to see the direct impact it has with the children and the parents.”
“We get to see that with the Big Event and Day of Service, but I think it’s something special about the holiday season,” said D’Iorio.
“You know you’re doing something really awesome for a lot of kids who might not be able to have this experience otherwise,” said Rizza. “As someone who works with students every day, I can’t help but be so inspired, happy and fulfilled seeing our students getting so much out of this experience.”
Rizza says that this is what the college experience is all about, “Helping to foster and facilitate experiences for students which they’re going to continually grow from.” Sometimes knowing you’re doing something good is just enough.
Occasionally, a student that attends Southern and volunteers for Friends of Rudolph will remember the day they came to the event as a child and walked through this on the other side. Rizza explained how fantastic it is to be approached by student volunteers and to hear about their progress up until this point in their lives.
“We do a lot of cool things at Southern, some things people know about, some things people don’t know about,” said Rizza. “But this is one of those things that a lot of people want to be involved in.”
