NU students get involved in ‘breakfast club’

By Anthony Savvides, News Correspondent

On a brisk, gray Sunday morning, 16 Northeastern students huddled together on the corner of St. Alphonsus and Calumet streets.  Many of them wore hats and gloves; some had scarves around their necks that blew in the wind.

Since Halloween, the Mission Hill Breakfast Club has met on Sunday mornings to help clean up the community. The club is a new student group that is run through the Off–Campus Student Services and organized by the campus ambassadors, and is intended as a means to ease tensions between the Northeastern and Mission Hill communities. Focused on giving back to the community, the club targets weekends notoriously heavy on the partying, such as the weekend before Thanksgiving break and this past weekend leading into the final week of classes.

Nate Cooper, a third-year finance student that recently became one of nine campus ambassadors working through Northeastern Off–Campus Student Services. Cooper is one of the two coordinators who called together the Mission Hill Breakfast Club for the final meeting of the fall semester.

“We want to show that not everybody from Northeastern trashes Mission Hill,” Cooper said. “We go around and pick up the trash, the red cups.  We’re trying to get rid of some of the perceptions of Northeastern students, because it’s our community, too.”

Cooper, who spent his first two years on campus, moved onto Mission Hill this year and has been engaged with his new community ever since. On NU Service day, he recalled, many Mission Hill residents approached the students volunteering and thanked them for their efforts.

“I’ve got a neighbor who has a family and kids, and I don’t want to be the one responsible for trashing his or other peoples’ lawns. Whether you live off campus or not, we still all need to be respectful,” he said.

Chase Billingham, a research assistant in the Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, said he thinks this initiative to give back to the community is a great idea, but it’s only the beginning.

“There should be cooperation between the communities to build lines of dialogue,” he said. “Reaching out to students as soon as possible is important, so they see the problems that exist and can be aware of them. The more opportunities that students have to get together to give back to the surrounding communities, the better.”

Meena Ramakrishnan, a third-year journalism student, is one of the members of the Mission Hill Breakfast Club.

“I just moved off campus this year and I wanted to get to know my neighbors. Since I’m not living on campus anymore, I feel more of a responsibility as a resident to give back to the community,” she said.

While Ramakrishnan is an off-campus resident, most of the 16 gathered on this Sunday morning are first-year students who are members of the Bouve Living Learning Community in Stetson West.

“We’re not picky about who comes out to volunteer,” Cooper said.

The group’s meeting this past Sunday was the last of the semester, but it will be back in January. While details are still up in the air, Cooper said the campus ambassadors and other members of Off–Campus Student Services have ideas about next semester, including a night for students moving off campus to meet and go over their leases. While the Mission Hill Breakfast Club might not immediately be back in session because of the weather, Cooper said the off-campus community will continue to give back to the neighborhood.

“The tensions that exist between the Northeastern community and Mission Hill are decades old,” Billingham said.  “I would caution that these problems won’t go away overnight.”