Five graduate students held the first Swap Day in The Perch on April 11, allowing members of the St. Joe’s community to bring household items they don’t use anymore to exchange for something they need.

The idea began as a class project for five Organization Development and Leadership (ODL) graduate students in Strategic Leadership, a course taught by visiting professor Kathleen Garrett, Ph.D.

“Swap Day is a way to recycle goods from students who are leaving each semester,” Garrett said. “They end up with a lot of stuff that can go to good use.”

The graduate students decided to help members of the St. Joe’s community share their unwanted items with each other. While many members of the community donated their items to the students to be shared with others, many students came to Swap Day to get items they need.

The group partnered with the international students group on campus and called for participants to bring books, small household items, clothing, non-perishable food and new or unopened hygiene products. In turn, the participants could take an item they needed as part of the swap day.

The classmates worked with Garrett, who said she consulted with them throughout the semester as they were designing their program.

“They started with finding a passion, because the whole idea is that leaders lead from passion,” Garrett said. “They’re a very diverse group of students and their passion was around diversity.”

Katherine Cartagena, who is now studying part time in the ODL program, said the group came up with the idea of having an event that would be mainly targeted to the diverse population at St. Joe’s, but also open to everyone. After the event, the items that they had left were given to an organization that works with immigrants and refugees.

“We had to come up with a passion that will unify us and all of us had something in common, which was helping diversity or immigrants or families,” Cartagena said. “We wanted to start with St. Joe’s first, with our community first, and then what we have left we’re going to share with people—with an organization that works with immigrants and refugees.”

Abdullah Alajmi M.S. ’20, one of the five graduate students who organized the event, is an international student from Saudi Arabia. Alajmi said he knows students who move out of their apartment and just leave their items behind.

“We coordinated with some students from our country to bring their stuff,” Alajmi said. “And [at] the end of the semester many students will leave the country and [go] back to my country after [they] finish the program, and they have a lot of stuff.”

Robin Robinson M.S. ’20, who also worked on the class project, said her team observed that students are often asked to help people outside of the St. Joe’s community and they decided that they could help people at St. Joe’s.

“There’s always a need for something,” Robinson said. “We know that there’s food disparities in all the college campuses all over the country even with people not having places to live. We wanted to be able to have an opportunity to give back to each other.”

Sociology major Daja Walker ’19 said she attended Swap Day because it was an opportunity for St. Joe’s students who have limited resources to find something that they need.

“A lot of times, especially at large universities like this that do cost a lot of money, there’s a segment of students who are underprivileged and don’t have a lot of things back home or here with them,” Walker said. “They go unnoticed and we don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about how there are poor college students at these expensive universi- ties who are struggling to get by.”

Isis Gill-Reid ’20, marketing major and vice president of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, said having this event would be a great way for organizations to better themselves and give back to the community.

“I think it’s a great way to get organizations to partner and do some community service,” Gill-Reid said.

Robinson said it’s not just for the students, and whoever needs something should take it.

“You know, there’s so much individualism, there’s not enough community,” Robinson said. “And that’s where we’re trying to build into this community. We all say that we’re a family but how are we truly showing that?”

Cartagena said the group is open to partner with anybody on campus, and she hopes to run the event again in the future.

“We want to do it every year or every se- mester if we can because we think it’s a cool thing,” Cartagena said. “We’re sharing with one another.”