'Dare to Contribute" Day of Service at Champlain College

Volunteers at Champlain College.

Champlain College faculty, staff and leadership team took an afternoon off from their regular duties Wednesday to give back to the Burlington community with its second annual "Dare to Contribute" Day of Service.

Cooking volunteers at ChamplainTeams of Champlainers worked on five different projects in Burlington, including:

  • Collecting and packaging hygiene kits (soap, deodorant, toothbrushes, etc) for distribution through the Committee on Temporary Shelter and Burlington Parks and Recreation summer camp programs 

  • Cooking meals for the Ronald McDonald House and Vermont Respite house in the College's Sodexo kitchens under the direction of Chef Sandra Earle.

  • Assembling summer reading programs for the Fletcher Free Library, cleaning the garden tools area and general grounds clean-up. 

  • Helping to build a new fence and prepared new raised garden bed plots at the Archibald Neighborhood Community Gardens in the Old North End. 

  • And rake and clean North Beach of trash and winter debris.

In all, some 170 people participated in the "Dare to Contribute" efforts. The day of service is becoming a tradition and is part of the College-wide May Update meeting that also included announcement of staff and faculty promotions, innovation awards and staff awards.

The Champlain College Day of Service and all-Campus Retreat Committee included Katie LeClair, Shaylea Scribner, Diana Matot, Howie Le, Mary M. Lee, Abbie Clark and Christina Erickson. Kyle Dodson of the Center for Service and Community Engagement also helped organize the community service locations.


Founded in 1878, Champlain College is a small, not-for-profit, private college in Burlington, Vermont, with additional campuses in Montreal, Canada, and Dublin, Ireland. Champlain offers a traditional undergraduate experience from its beautiful campus overlooking Lake Champlain and over 90 residential undergraduate and online undergraduate and graduate degree programs and certificates. Champlain's distinctive career-driven approach to higher education embodies the notion that true learning occurs when information and experience come together to create knowledge. Champlain College is included in the Princeton Review's The Best 384 Colleges: 2019 Edition. For the fourth year in a row, Champlain was named a "Most Innovative School" in the North by U.S. News & World Report's 2019 "America's Best Colleges,” and a “Best Value School” and is ranked in the top 100 “Regional Universities of the North” and in the top 25 for “Best Undergraduate Teaching.” Champlain is also featured in the Fiske Guide to Colleges for 2019 as one of the "best and most interesting schools" in the United States, Canada and Great Britain and is a 2019 College of Distinction. For more information, visit champlain.edu.