Twenty years. Thirty-two thousand hands. One goal: Change the world. By Gia Rassier
It’s a lofty goal, really. But big dreams and lofty aspirations have to start somewhere. The story of Hands for Change, Concordia’s service-learning Orientation event, began more than 20 years ago with a small group of student leaders, a couple of dedicated Cobber staff and a vision. “We were in the early stages of integrating service with the whole college experience, including academics,” says Chelle Lyons Hanson ‘84, director of Student Leadership and Service. “It only made sense to introduce new students to that concept as they came into college.” Hands for Change started as a small pilot project in 1993 when several Orientation clubs volunteered for a twohour period in the Fargo-Moorhead community. It was a smashing success and became a full-fledged Orientation event the following year. That’s when longtime friends Kaia (Flam) Mahlke ’95 and Heather (Sewall) Torgerson ’95 teamed up to organize it. At the time, Torgerson served as Orientation chair and Mahlke as the director of SOS or Sources fOr Service, today known as Campus Service Commission.
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The roommates asked their organizations to help with calling, coordinating, painting and planning. “The students involved did amazing work to pull the event together,” says Lyons Hanson. “They made it happen.” Though influencing the affairs of the world through service had long been part of the college mission, the concept of service-learning was new to the curriculum – and community. “It took quite a bit of time and effort to introduce the idea to community organizations and to develop service projects that would be both helpful to the community and meaningful to the students,” recalls Mahlke. “Concordia was just starting to implement service-learning into some of the curriculum.”