Community Service at Heart of Spring Break Trips, Pomona Students Say

As they crafted an itinerary for Pomona’s first AlternaBreak trip to Las Vegas, Pherell Washington ’29 and Jeremy Mitchell ’27 planned stops at organizations that lend a hand to schoolchildren from low-income families.

“Jeremy and I both come from Title I schools,” Washington says, “so our goal was to show our group how much of a difference there is between schools that have a lot of resources or money and schools that don’t.”

With no past trips to Las Vegas to draw from, Draper Center Director Sefa Aina connected Washington and Mitchell with Maria Tucker, the founding director of the Draper Center who now works closely with Las Vegas nonprofits, institutions of higher learning and government entities.

With Tucker’s help, the student coordinators mapped out a week of service in the desert.

The cohort first visited Obodo Collective and Executive Director Tameka Henry, a trustee on the Clark County school board. The group tended to Obodo’s urban farm and learned how Henry works at the intersection of community health and school stability.

Students later visited the Jeremiah Program, where Tucker serves as executive director, to hear how the organization helps single mothers and their children achieve economic mobility.

An especially enlightening service project saw Washington and his peers help the nonprofit Shine A Light pack kits of essentials for the hundreds of people living in the city’s underground flood channels.

Other excursions to Spread the Word Nevada and UNLV highlighted childhood literacy and another type of collegiate experience, respectively.

“We met so many amazing people in Vegas and learned so much about the education system, which added a lot of perspective,” Washington says. “We had a lot of deep conversations about where we are now and where we’re from.”

“I’m so grateful I had this experience,” Washington adds. AlternaBreak has been “one of the best things I’ve done in my year here.”

Service Through Creative Labor in Oakland

Community service takes many shapes, and as important as volunteering at gardens or in soup kitchens and clinics is to community health, so too is service through creative labor, says Amirah Lockett ’26.

In Oakland, Lockett and her cohort collaborated with art- and youth-centered organizations that have been woven into the fabric of daily life.

The group helped the Bay Area Mural Program paint a mural in East Oakland; learned how Beats Rhymes and Life empowers youth to use hip hop as therapy; and toured Chinatown with the Community Liberation Programs to see how elderly residents receive groceries.

“You could feel the love and community in Oakland,” says Lockett, a media studies major and transfer student from Victorville, California.

Coordinated in collaboration with the Office of Black Student Affairs, the Oakland trip included stops at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland and the Black Panther Party Museum downtown.

“I learned about the cultural presence of Black people in Oakland,” Lockett says. “I always saw it as a predominantly Black city, so being there and seeing all the resources to learn about the history of who was there, of who built the community, was nice to see.”

While visitors in Oakland, Lockett says she and her peers returned to Claremont with a greater appreciation for being part of a community.

“AlternaBreak gives you a whole different perspective,” she adds. “You realize the conditions of how people live, and while you might not be part of their community for long, you get the courage and desire to work within yours when you return home.”

Sweat Equity in San Francisco

San Francisco’s Tenderloin District is in perennial need of helping hands.

Long associated with open drug use and homelessness, the downtown neighborhood is a focal point for local nonprofits and where Briselda Nuñez ’28 and Ethan Du ’26 wanted to pitch in.

Their cohort collaborated with the San Francisco chapter of GLIDE, whose mission is to create an inclusive, just and loving community to break the cycles of poverty and marginalization.

In addition to packing meals for the district’s unhoused, the group helped GLIDE workers physically clean the streets.

“You could really see the care and love that the organization has for the community and those in tough situations,” Nuñez says. “Being able to connect with the people there and have conversations really inspired me to continue the work I do at the Draper Center.”

While planning their trip, Nuñez and Du were intentional about collaborating with organizations addressing homelessness, immigration and health equity.

Across its three days in San Francisco, the cohort worked with GLIDE, La Raza Community Resource Center, Mission Action and HomeRise—organizations whose work lives at the intersection of all three issues, Nuñez says.

The students rode public transportation to get from place to place and stopped at Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences and the San Francisco Botanical Garden.

Lunches and dinners provided brief respites from packed schedules, and Nuñez says everyone in the group knew more about each other by the time they returned to Claremont.

“I had a really fun time and would want to go again, to a different site,” Nuñez adds. “I want to explore more places and work with other organizations doing important work.”