New duke students get to know Durham by lending helping hands

BY RAY GRONBERG gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

Student volunteers from duke University fanned out into several north Durham neighborhoods Saturday to help residents with their yard work.

The effort, sponsored by Keep Durham Beautiful Inc. and duke's Community Service Center, targeted the Old Farm neighborhood and several subdivisions along Holt School Road and was intended to benefit elderly and disabled homeowners.

Organizers expected about 100 students to participate. A group of about 35 descended on the Old Farm neighborhood. The students split up into five teams to cover as many houses as they could in the four hours allotted to the project.

One team converged on the home of Old Well Street resident Betty Williams, who's disabled and has been preoccupied by her 81-year-old mother's hospitalization for a stroke. A couple of students split off to work at a house across the street.

The duke students said they welcomed a chance to lend a hand. "Durham is going to be my home for the next four years," Kaitlyn Shackelton, a freshman from Reno, Nev., said when asked why she volunteered to participate in the effort. "I figured, 'Anything to pitch in.' "

Organizers worked with the Old Farm Neighborhood Association to identify homeowners who could use the help. The predominantly black neighborhood is mostly middle class, but association leaders said they felt the volunteer effort was well-targeted.

They said helping and staying in touch with the neighborhood's elderly residents was an important community stabilization measure.

The neighborhood has "been nice, but it's getting older and things are changing," said Carolyn Young, an Old Farm Neighborhood Association activist who was working with Shackelton and the rest of the team at the Williams house. "When we moved out here, this was the area to move into. Old Farm was it, and we want to help it keep that reputation."

duke students have participated in similar cleanups in years past, but this year campus leaders elected to make the effort part of the school's orientation week activities for freshmen.

The so-called "Into the City" effort, which on Saturday also included several faculty-led tours of different parts of Durham, has gotten increased attention this year in the wake of last spring's rape charges against members of the duke lacrosse team.

But Carly Wheeler, a junior from San Diego, said campus leaders were thinking about holding a cleanup effort during orientation week before the lacrosse scandal broke.

"It's something the First-Year Advisory Counselor board and the university had been discussing for awhile," Wheeler said, adding that the point of the change was to "incorporate community service" into the orientation effort.


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