More than 100 Wartburg College students will spend their Winter Term break working on service projects around the nation.

The 118 students, accompanied by faculty and staff advisers, will be involved in 10 service trips, Feb. 25-March 3, to help those living in poverty, rebuild homes, repair camp and park facilities, assist people with HIV/AIDS and meet spiritual needs through music.

Each group will partner with a local organization to address a community-identified need.

“All of our trips are student-proposed and student-led,” said Renee Sedlacek, Wartburg’s service-learning coordinator. “It empowers students to take ownership and adds to the creativity.”

Wartburg was ranked No. 1 during 2009-10 by Break Away, the national alternative break organization, for having the highest percentage of students (15.3) on service trips among its 150 chapters.

The service trip destinations are:

• Camp Lone Star, La Grange, Texas, to perform maintenance and renovate facilities at the camp run by Lutheran Outdoors Ministry of Texas.
• Tuscaloosa, Ala., where an F-4 tornado last spring caused massive destruction and killed 47. The participants will help Community Collaboration International rebuild houses, while staying in an evacuation shelter setting to better understand the experience of displaced families. 
• James River State Park in Virginia to work with the American Hiking Society building trails.
• The St. Louis area to help the Doorways group and various organizations serving HIV/AIDS-infected individuals.
• Springfield, Mo., where they’ll work with Kitchen Inc., a progressive innovator for meeting needs and addressing root causes of poverty and homelessness. The students will serve meals in a soup kitchen and help with the maintenance of the Kitchen Inc. campus.
• Chicago to assist elementary school students at the inner-city Holy Family Ministries.
• Denver where they’ll work at a food bank, serve meals at a soup kitchen, experience poverty personally during the Food Stamp Lunch Challenge and assist Urban Ministries and other organizations.
• East St. Louis, Ill., working primarily with Catholic Urban Programs, while also spending a day at a local elementary school, an afterschool activities program, a soup kitchen, a thrift store, and a breakfast bus, and working directly with the homeless handing out lunches.
• Chicago and St. Louis, assisting churches, schools and other organizations with traditional service work and meeting spiritual needs through the music of the student band Hope Overflow.

Seclacek will lead the 10^th trip to New Orleans as part of a Inquiry Studies course. The students will rebuild homes, while partnering with Common Ground Relief, which helps victims of Hurricane Katrina.

At all locations, the Wartburg students will be readily identifiable by OrangeCorps T-shirts.

“OrangeCorps brings all student service organizations together under a ‘service umbrella’ and the shirts will help service trip students stand out in the communities they are serving,” Sedlacek said.

Wartburg is a four-year, selective liberal arts college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, internationally recognized for community engagement. The college enrolls 1,805 students from 29 U.S. states and 49 countries. Its top five majors in terms of student enrollment are biology, business administration, communication arts, elementary education and psychology.