Hogs and Kisses is a micro-sanctuary that opened its barn doors in Charlottesville in 2021. This year, Madison House is partnering with the farm to give UVA students an opportunity to volunteer with the seven pigs, five rabbits, and two turkeys! Click to learn more about Hogs & Kisses and the volunteer experience.
Madison House’s Creating Assets, Savings, and Hope (CASH) program works to train and coordinate student-volunteers to provide free tax preparation for low- and moderate-income community members…This year marks 15 years since the launch of the C’ville Tax Aid Coalition — a partnership including Madison House and the University of Virginia Community Credit Union that is coordinated by the United Way of Greater Charlottesville. Since its inception in 2007, the Coalition has generated over $35 million in direct economic impact for the Charlottesville area community.
As a first year at the University of Virginia (UVA), Chelsea Li (CLAS ‘20) wanted to soak up all the opportunities that the University had to offer. She found herself exploring new clubs and classes and was especially eager to be in the community. “In high school,” she said, “I felt as if I was missing a lot of the learning that happens outside the classroom.” This desire to stretch her curiosity across disciplines and interests, along with an intrinsic desire to uplift those around her, was what first brought Chelsea to Madison House.
The House has long been a place where students can come to find or rediscover themselves and their place within the community. This held true for Paige, who shared that “it gives me peace of mind knowing that I am a good swimmer but that's not what defines me. There's so much more to life, like helping others. My time at Madison House has allowed me to see that.”
Kruse, from Ridgeland, Mississippi, is a fourth-year student in the McIntire School of Commerce. She initially got involved in the program because of her prior experience in advocacy work.
“Ultimately, the goal of the program is for students to learn about environmental science through a native lens,” Kruse said. “Maelee Hearington, another UVA student, and I wrote the curriculum to focus on science, social activism and social justice. We also provide additional resources like workbooks, markers, easels and notebooks.”
Mikaela Richardson (CLAS '22) and Caroline Hallowell (CLAS '21) started the Hoos Helping Initiative along with Dr. Rose Cole, Madison House's Director of Community Engagement.
The program was created in response to courses moving online last spring. Hoos Helping matches UVA students to community partners, such as youth workers and educators, to provide completely virtual assistance.
When Shapiro got to UVA, he was scrolling through the website of Madison House – the independent, nonprofit volunteer center for UVA students – looking for volunteering opportunities when he came across HELP Line.
HELP Line is a free and confidential telephone hotline serving UVA and the surrounding area. It is a student-run and student-operated empathetic listening and referral hotline, staffed entirely by anonymous UVA student volunteers.
“I thought, ‘This has got to be the coolest thing ever,’” Shapiro said.
The strong community that exists among the University’s students would be nothing without the support of the broader Charlottesville community. For that reason, Madison House directors and student volunteers have remained dedicated to serving the people of Charlottesville and supporting them through the most difficult times of the pandemic. Although Madison House’s volunteer services will function very differently than in previous years, many efforts will continue virtually in order to strengthen the Charlottesville community.
“Our programs will focus almost exclusively on virtual volunteering,” said Rose Cole, Madison House director of community engagement, in an email to The Cavalier Daily. “There will be some exceptions made for in-person volunteering based on community needs — focused only on medical services, food insecurity and food justice and support for essential workers — but we can’t begin in-person volunteering until we know how safe it will be.”
"We have players all over Virginia, all over the East Coast, in New York and Boston," he said. "We have people out on the West Coast, in Oregon and California and one player from England, so it has really kind of become a big thing."
Not only is the game bringing together family and friends but it also benefiting Charlottesville-area charities like Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry, Madison House and the Legal Aid Justice Center.
"There's so many great organizations already established in Charlottesville, we thought we could help them along and all those donations would go to a big cause," said White.
As a first-year student, Loyd got involved with Madison House almost immediately.
“It helped me connect to the community in Charlottesville and have some perspective on my own privilege and feel more like a community member,” she said. “I was not that comfortable in the social scene, in the sorority and fraternity scene. I felt a little bit like fish out of water. … I was a little overwhelmed.
“And so Madison House was a nice way for me to find my people and way of being.”
Once a week, Loyd made a 40-minute drive to Louisa with a fellow volunteer to tutor the teenager.
“I remember being really challenged by her in ways that were important for me to face,” said Loyd, who lost touch with the teen after college. “She would just stand up for herself a lot, kind of like, ‘I don’t want to do that and you have no idea how hard my life is.’
“The students began to think incredibly creatively,” Ochs said. “They anticipated how technology would be used to sustain individuals and communities; they designed texts that could be used for virtual rituals.”
Prior to the pandemic, the students – many working in conjunction with Madison House – had been able to give back to the Charlottesville community in a number of ways, including mentoring young people with autism, volunteering at the Salvation Army and Goodwill, adopting a grandparent, teaching children to read and helping people with taxes.
From there, the students created their own Haggadahs, using the traditional text as their inspiration.
During the rest of her time at UVA, Hoerr hopes to integrate Backpack Buddies into the UVA community, potentially through a collaboration with Madison House.
“We’re so proud of what Lucia has accomplished,” Carter Hoerr said. “Over the past 10 years she has shown both determination and real empathy for the needy kids in our area – two pretty remarkable traits for a kid her age.”
Hoerr wants Backpack Buddies to live on after she graduates.
“My goal is to have a succession plan in place so that Backpack Buddies can continue to run in Charlottesville even without me here watching over it,” she said. “I also hope that wherever I end up I will be able to set up a new branch of Backpack Buddies and continue to expand my nonprofit far and wide.”
Volunteering with children made me consider the stigma surrounding body accessories and tattoos
I was never forced to confront my impulsive decision head-on until last semester when I signed up to volunteer in an elementary school classroom through Madison House. Insecurities suddenly flooded my mind. What would the teachers think of me? Would they see me as unprofessional? And most dauntingly, what would the children — in all of their reckless and unconstrained honesty — say about me?
Or would they even say anything at all? I knew my father’s world is completely different from my own, so I wondered if students and younger teachers in today’s school system would even have an opinion. I know from my own upbringing that millennials and members of Generations Z and Alpha have been raised on messages of self-expression and acceptance, so the youth of today must be far more used to seeing tattoos and piercings on a day-to-day basis.
“I realized I hadn’t devoted enough time giving back to the Charlottesville community, even though I had grown to love this place,” said Anderson, now a first-year UVA Law student. She decided to join the Madison House Big Siblings Program, drawn to the idea of a “deeply personal volunteering experience.”
“The program paired me with Jazhara, who was 5 years old at the time, and through her I met Jojo, who was 2,” she said. Now the kids are 10 and 8, and have known Anderson more than half their lives. “Looking back, it’s amazing how many of my favorite memories involve these two kids.”
Ashley Williams is a fourth-year in the College of Arts and Sciences majoring in Human Biology. Ashley volunteers with Madison House's Medical Services program where she has worked in the Outpatient Surgery Center and Emergency Department for 2 years. She is also a Peer Health Educator, works as a Planned Parenthood Generation Action Community Organizer and has also been a CASPCA Foster Parent during her time at UVA. Ashley's other involvements at UVA include her role as a research volunteer in the Department of Neurosurgery Undergraduate Research Volunteer, a Culture of Respect Educator, and as the Mixed Race Student Coalition Outreach Chair.
“Whatever you are passionate about, find a way to get involved and commit to it! I think a lot of undergraduate students (especially pre-meds) get caught up in resume building opportunities instead of giving back in a way that is truly personal and meaningful to them. While giving back in any way is great, it will most likely only be sustainable work if it is important to you. “
“When I first got to UVA, I knew I wanted to get out of the "bubble" of the University and engage with the surrounding Charlottesville community. While UVA has a lot to offer in terms of involvement and service, I wanted to make sure that I learned more about the city and was an active, involved resident of Charlottesville. I heard about CART (Charlottesville Area Riding Therapy) through Madison House my first year and decided to try it out! From there, I became interested in taking care of children with medical needs or disabilities.
For me, seeing some of the students over the past three years improve in some of their skills and behaviors has been really rewarding. I love seeing that students at CART are having a positive experience, often are able to improve their skills, and leave the barn feeling accomplished. Besides that, I've also met many amazing people and really enjoyed getting to know them!”
Every week, University of Virginia’s Learning in Action, an initiative designed to connect students, faculty, and community partners to social entrepreneurship, community engagement, and co–curricular service opportunities, features a volunteer as their ‘Volunteer of the Week.’ Madison House has been at the forefront of service at the University of Virginia, and this can be reflected in Madison House’s consistent appearance within the Volunteer of the Week’s highlights. For two weeks in a row, Madison House volunteers have been featured by Learning in Action.
The Virginia Athletics department launched ACE as a way to connect student athletes with volunteering opportunities. Currently, the program has almost 70 athletes, and last fall, the program teamed up with Madison House. Under the leadership of Rachel Clark, Class of 2019 alumna and one of Madison House’s 2018-2019 community engagement interns, ACE has made it easier to send athlete volunteers into local elementary schools.
Roughly 3,000 students a year volunteer through Madison House. Nearly 40,000 have participated since the center opened in September 1969, according to Tim Freilich (Col ’93, Law ’99), executive director of Madison House and a volunteer there during his undergrad years. In 2018-19 alone, he estimates, students contributed more than 108,000 hours to local projects, from adopt-a-grandparent programs and teacher’s aide positions to patient-care roles at hospitals and free clinics.
[…]
“You can’t learn this type of leadership through a textbook,” Freilich says. “The experience that our 300 student leaders get as they lead their peers is probably the most valuable thing that Madison House does.”
Madison House, the independent, nonprofit volunteer center for UVA students, [was] founded (in its current iteration) shortly before Camille. This year also marks its 50th anniversary.
“My own opinion is that student response to Camille had a great deal to do with subsequent support for Madison House,” Casteen wrote. “It had existed before Camille, and its people had always had their own active lives, but the work following Camille made everyone grow up very quickly.
“Campus Compact came along two decades later. Madison House and its volunteers invented their model on their own.” It’s a model that has worked well over the last half-century.
“Madison House has been what its creators and student volunteers hoped it would be – a catalyst for action by students to benefit surrounding communities and a constructive force in the lives of people living in communities around us,” Casteen wrote.
Eight Madison House Volunteers Receive Fulbright Scholarships:
Shree Baphna
“I think of it as a way for me to understand the power and value behind immersion,” Baphna said. “My future career in public health may involve attempting to understand the experience of other people so that I can figure out what is the best way to help them access the resources they need. For that, I need to have knowledge on how to best communicate with them. More so than that, I must learn how to understand the people I am working with so as to respect who they are and where they come from.”
She is a researcher working in labs in the biology, biomedical engineering and neurological surgery departments. Also a Madison House volunteer, she is a founder and head program director of the Creative Learning After School and Summer Program; a program director with Madison House Medical Services; a member of the Madison House HELP Line Outreach Team….
[During Alita’s] first semester, she ventured to Madison House, the independent, nonprofit volunteer center for UVA students.
“When I found Rise Together [through Madison House], I felt like their initiative, and just talking about my experiences and topics like bullying, was important to [the students],” she said. “I thought it was a really great initiative that I was glad to be a part of.”
Last spring, through Madison House, the independent, nonprofit volunteer center for UVA students, Duckett volunteered for a program called Creating Assets, Savings and Hope, or CASH, which helps people file their taxes.
“That was by far one of my favorite memories of UVA,” Duckett said. “It’s something I think a lot of us take for granted.
“There were clients we had who were refugees from Afghanistan and didn’t speak English. Being able to help someone and seeing people’s faces when they got a refund was amazing… For a lot of people, an extra $1,000 may go toward a new TV, but for our clients $1,000 was more of a lifeline.”
Harrington found many ways to contribute – to the University and the community beyond baseball. He got involved with an organization called Team IMPACT, which connects seriously ill children with collegiate athletic teams. He also volunteers at Madison House, and with several other student volunteer organizations.
“We have this great platform as student-athletes,” he said. “We have an opportunity and a responsibility to be good role models for kids and society generally. And it’s fun, being with a great group of guys doing something of benefit to others.”
