On September 27, more than 1,000 UCLA students boarded shuttles, carpooled, and walked to sites across Los Angeles as part of Bruin Volunteer Day, the UCLA Volunteer Center's annual signature event. The day dispatched students to food banks in South LA, schools in Compton and Inglewood, parks and trail systems around the Westside, senior centers in Brentwood and Culver City, veterans' facilities in West LA, and emergency shelters in Hollywood and downtown.
For many students, particularly those arriving in their first weeks of college, Volunteer Day is the first time they have engaged with Los Angeles as a place rather than a backdrop. The university they enrolled in sits within one of the most economically stratified metropolitan areas in the country, a reality that can be easy to lose sight of from a campus that, with its Romanesque architecture and manicured quads, is itself a kind of enclave. Volunteer Day, by design, disrupts that enclosure.
UCLA UniCamp, the student charity organization that has operated since 1934 and provides outdoor, mentorship-based camp experiences for underserved youth, coordinated one of the largest contingents of the day, with over 100 students working at partner sites focused on youth development in South Los Angeles. UniCamp has been running on the same basic model for nearly a century: students raise their own funds to attend and lead a summer camp session, and in doing so develop skills in facilitation, conflict resolution, and community building that many of them describe as formative.
Bruins for Accessible Education sent students to temporary shelters and transitional housing facilities in Hollywood to provide STEM tutoring sessions to youth experiencing housing instability. The organization, now in its third year, has built a curriculum that is adaptable to the variable and often interrupted educational backgrounds of students who cycle through the shelter system and has trained its student tutors specifically to work in that environment.
Be Green Bruin, the campus sustainability organization, coordinated a group working at a community garden in Koreatown and a farmers' market in Venice, with students helping with setup, harvest, and outreach to market visitors. The organization's community service programming is connected to a broader curriculum on urban food systems that it runs in partnership with UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
The Volunteer Center operates year-round service placements at dozens of sites, and Volunteer Day is the single largest mobilization of that network. For organizations in Los Angeles that partner with the university, the day represents a meaningful infusion of labor on projects that their regular staff and volunteers cannot complete on their own. For students, it represents something harder to quantify but easier to feel: the experience of being part of a city, not just a campus within one.