Wet T-shirt contests. Sandy beaches. Booze. Community service.
Often when you combine the first three, you can end up being court mandated to do the last. But Florida Alternative Breaks has done it again — broken the stereotypes of the typical college Spring Break trip by sending hundreds of students around the nation and around the world to serve their communities.
With the state of the economy, some students have put a creative twist on typical fundraising techniques like scholarships and car washes.
Megan Iseman, a UF health science sophomore, is going on a FAB trip to Guatemala with 14 other students to work on poverty and development issues.
To help fund her trip, she turned to Facebook.
Because Iseman’s trip is international, it is much more expensive than a domestic destination, and she could only afford half of it on her own.
She said she didn’t want to give up on the trip because of financial hardships, so she created a Facebook group and invited her friends to donate as much as they could.
Iseman said the fundraising her FAB group did together, like working concessions at Gators basketball games and soliciting donations at Walmart, did not even begin to put a dent in her expenditures.
Slowly but surely, donations from $1 to $50 began to pour in from friends. Just one month after creating the Facebook group, she had the other half of her trip cost covered, collecting $680 in total.
“My friends are the reason I am still going on this trip,” Iseman said.
She said the reason she is so passionate about the alternative break is because of the issue of poverty and development that she will be addressing, through which she hopes to make a positive impact on the oppressed native Mayan people.
Katie Conlon, another FAB trip sophomore, chose marine life protection as her issue and will be spending her Spring Break in Naples, Fla., cleaning beaches and trails, rebuilding docks and removing invasive plant and animal species.
Family members and friends helped her pay for the trip by giving her money for Christmas.
“My Christmas present definitely didn’t fit under the tree,” Conlon said.
Instead of asking for a new iPod, Conlon asked to spend her Spring Break doing hard labor while learning more about her major, environmental science.
“I knew that the fundraising we did wouldn’t cover all of it, and I don’t work during the school year so I didn’t have much to put towards the trip myself,” Conlon said. “I don’t look at it as a sacrifice at all. I see it as an awesome opportunity for personal career development, community service and a little relaxation in the Florida sun.”
