Senior Noah Sakin was a normal, highly involved Elon University student: He went about his day as a Leadership Fellow, Elon Volunteers! student leader and risk manager for his fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau.
But on Nov. 9, his face was splashed across the front page of E-Net under the headline, “Elon senior Noah Sakin honored for community service.” Though Sakin was glad to receive the award, the coverage of this award took him by surprise.
“It’s weird and sort of can be uncomfortable because I didn’t realize it was going to be on E-Net and all this stuff,” he said. “I just sort of thought it was to represent the Kernodle Center, Elon Volunteers!, Safe Rides, Alternative Breaks, the things that I’m a part of. I guess ultimately it is still about getting the word out about Elon Volunteers!.”
North Carolina Campus Compact recognized Sakin with the 2015 Community Impact Award, which was given to student leaders from 21 colleges and universities across the state, honoring them for outstanding service in their campus and local communities.
At the Campus Compact conference earlier this month, Sakin joined an elite group of student service leaders — since the award’s first class of recipients in 2006, there have been more than 200 Campus Compact Community Impact Award recipients. In addition to the awards ceremony, students who attended the conference had an opportunity to fellowship and network with students leading unique service projects on campuses all over North Carolina.
“I really liked going to the conference where they gave out the awards because we got to see what other people were doing at different schools,” Sakin said. “It was really inspirational because their campuses are different than ours and they have different needs, local communities and people are really taking what they have and running with it in their local communities.”
Though Sakin has been involved in service throughout his college career, he was not initially expecting to be nominated for the award. When the staff adviser for Safe Rides asked him for his resume, he had some idea — but not that the Kernodle Center staff viewed him as a great candidate for the award.
Bob Frigo, associate director of Elon’s Kernodle Center for Service Learning and Community Engagement, is the staff member who nominated Sakin for the Campus Compact Award.
“Noah has a deep commitment to partnership with others,” Frigo said in an interview with University Communications. “Since he first arrived at Elon, he has really gone above and beyond.”
Early commitment to service
Sakin holds multiple leadership positions in the Kernodle Center. He is head captain of Safe Rides, a position that puts him on the executive board, making decisions about the future of a program that is currently experiencing severe budget cuts.
Sakin was recently hired as director of Alternative Breaks, a program that sends students off campus to do service projects instead of going on vacation during breaks throughout the academic year. Though Sakin supervises program coordinators, the student leaders plan every detail.
“I just sort of oversee the coordinators, I don’t do any of the planning,” he said. “They’re student-led programs that focus on different social issues both domestically and internationally and they provide opportunities for people to apply and go on these programs and work on a specific social issue in a specific area.”
Last year, Sakin went on his first alternative break. He traveled with a group of students and a student coordinator to Jacksonville, Florida, where they worked with immigrants and refugees. This was his only experience on an alternative break before overseeing the entire program, but he has been volunteering for Safe Rides since his freshman year.
“Safe rides has been my biggest thing,” he said. “The fact that you’re engaging with the entire student body and that it’s open for every student to use. It’s really cool that we get university vehicles and they trust us with those to operate and move a couple hundred people around campus every night. It’s a sort of freedom, but a lot of responsibility too.”
Leadership and service intersect
As a Human Service Studies major and Leadership Studies minor, Sakin has experienced two major aspects of community involvement. He finds that these ares of study collide often in his engagement both in and out of the classroom.
Studying leadership and being involved in leadership fellows, you really get to learn those skills, how to plan something and make it work,” he said. “Leading a reflection is something we do a lot in EV! [Elon Volunteers!] and it’s something that I’ve learned how to do through EV! and also through leadership.”
One of the greatest challenges, Sakin said, is keeping everyone engaged no matter why they initially got involved. In Sakin’s experience with Safe Rides, there is usually a mixture of students volunteering their time and students who are there as a punishment for misconduct.
“How do I get that group to interact and engage and realize that no matter why you’re there, you need to be enjoying this for us to be successful?,” he often asks himself. “How do I help you enjoy it?”
Much of the reflection he participates in is from his coursework through leadership studies, a minor program that Leadership Fellows complete. When Sakin applied for the fellows program, he was mostly focused on the personal development opportunities the program would offer through relationships with other fellows.
“It’s a core group of people who are going to be inspiring,” he said. “It’s always good to surround yourself with those kinds of people, who are going to be involved, sometimes over-involved, pushing you to do things. They’re still your first friends at Elon, no matter what.”
Before he came to Elon, Sakin had limited involvement with service because there were very few specific opportunities. When he visited campus, he saw the Moseley tables as a testament to the level of engagement that is expected of students.
“Elon has the environment that allows you to get involved and to do things that you want to do and take on leadership roles and make programs your own,” he said.
In addition to other fellows, his fraternity and his friends, Sakin finds a great deal of support in Kernodle Center professional and student staff.
“Everyone who’s involved in the service office, they make you want to keep going back and they figure out leadership positions that you’d be good for,” he said. “They’ll keep you involved and they’re so passionate. It’s just somewhere that you want to be.”