Scarlett Simancek to Spend Winter Break Helping Seriously Ill Children in NH

2012 Dec 12

Scarlett Simancek, an exercise science major from Waterford, Mich., is spending some of the 2012 winter break lending a hand in the season of giving. As co-site leader of an 11-student team from Saginaw Valley State University, Simancek will travel to Greenfield, N.H., working with the Crotched Mountain Foundation to help plan activities in a school for children with serious medical conditions. The group departs Sunday, Dec. 16, and arrives back home Friday, Dec. 21.

The trip is part of SVSU's chapter of Alternative Breaks, a nationwide organization in which students spend academic breaks traveling domestically and abroad performing charitable work to combat social issues. From SVSU, three other trips are heading out this winter break, with projects in Joplin, Mo., Elizabethtown, Ky., and Washington, D.C.

Within Alternative Breaks, teams raise money to cover the traveling, teach the community about their social issue and learn more about it themselves as they prepare for their trip. Then, in the weeks after their service, students devote time to the social issue in their own community, as part of the organization's mission to enable its members as active global citizens.

Saginaw Valley State University is a comprehensive university that offers 90 programs of study for more than 10,000 students on its suburban campus in Michigan's Great Lakes Bay Region. SVSU is committed to quality teaching in the classroom, field-based learning experiences, NCAA Division II athletics and a range of academic and extracurricular opportunities for students to excel.