Alivia Wulff and Grace Christensen stood behind a table surrounded by boxes of fresh greens. Flurries of people came through the line: a young couple, a man wearing glasses fogged from the cold and a teen in Mario Bros. pajamas. Wulff and Christensen offered bags of grapes and boxes of spinach to each person, letting them know they could take three types of produce from the next table until all of the boxes on the table were empty and the doors closed for the night.
“We fed 300 families today,” Montserrat Sanchez Barco, food access specialist at CLUES food shelf in St. Paul, said.
Wulff and Christensen shared a smile.
Intermediate Spanish II students are required to volunteer a certain number of hours at various local volunteer centers during the semester. One of these sites is Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio [Latino Communities United in Service], or as the students call it, CLUES. The center provides education and mentoring opportunities as well as a food shelf.
While volunteering at CLUES, students interact with the Hispanic community and improve their Spanish fluency. Sarah Steil, Adjunct Instructor of Languages and Cultures at Bethel University, said that volunteering at CLUES opens students’ minds to the growing Latino community in the United States.
“Using your Spanish in a real-world situation or authentic situation pushes it to a completely different level,” Steil said. “It definitely puts a face with what we read about and study and listen to the news in Spanish and read articles in Spanish.”
“They’re really leaders in the community, where the goal is that they feel comfortable and they can bridge that gap and they can reach across and say, ‘Could I help you?’” Steil said.
Wulff and Christensen volunteered twice a week for the entirety of the fall semester – students are only required to do 25 hours. After attending four classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, Wulff and Christensen packed into Wulff’s gecko-green Jeep Gladiator and drove down to the CLUES St. Paul location. They walked through the sliding glass doors, greeting the hundreds of people with a warm smile and a “¿cómo estás?”
“At CLUES, they’re always going out of their way to ask how you are,” Christensen said. “They’re treating you like family.”
The two students witnessed the smiles spread across families’ faces as they walked through the line filling cardboard boxes with leafy greens, fresh bread and baked goods. When they weren’t serving the families, they would catch up with their fellow volunteers, practicing their Spanish while talking about weekends and life.
“[CLUES] flipped my perspective of like when you hear the word ‘volunteer,’” Wulff said. “Obviously it’s serving others, but in a lot of ways, it’s also serving ourselves… it’s been such a fulfilling experience.”
