![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/wilson-day-2015.jpg\")
Students congregate in the Palestra, wearing matching Wilson Day T-shirts (this year\u2019s color is blue). After opening remarks set the tone for the day, the students board buses and go out into the community in assigned groups.<\/p>\n
The official name has been changed from Wilson Day of Service to Wilson Day of Engagement this year. The theme is \u201cThink Global, Act Local.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a day of bonding and, really, a day of community engagement,\u201d Cerosaletti says. \u201cWe feel the students get as much out of it as the host sites they are helping.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilson Day is named after Joseph Wilson \u201931, former chairman of the University\u2019s Board of Trustees and founder of Xerox Corporation, in honor of his community service. By the time of Wilson\u2019s death in 1971, he and his wife, Peggy, had given more than $40 million to the University and helped launch it into a major research center.<\/p>\n
Wilson Day was first established in 1972 as a daylong offering of seminars on the River Campus and Medical Center, a dinner at the Memorial Art Gallery, and a concert at the Eastman Theatre. In 1988, thanks to Guenther\u2019s idea, it became much more.<\/p>\n
Kavya Bana \u201919 is this year\u2019s Wilson Day coordinator. As a first-year student, her Wilson Day project was to sort food for Foodlink. It struck a chord in the political science and microbiology double major from Simsbury, Connecticut.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t feel as if I was helping the community but rather learning from it and working within it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt opened my eyes to the passion of community members for improving the community they live in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bana has since worked two other Wilson Days as a resident assistant, organizing a food pantry and gardening. She also began volunteering at a city school, interned at the Rochester Public Market, and was part of Urban Fellows, a summer urban engagement program for Rochester-area undergraduates.<\/p>\n
\u201cNone of this would have happened if not for Wilson Day,\u201d she says. \u201cI never would have noticed how special the people in the community are if I hadn\u2019t been brought outside of campus boundaries my very first week here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More than 1,300 incoming students will fan out to about 90 Rochester schools, libraries, senior centers, neighborhood associations, and more to paint, stack bookshelves, rake, pull weeds, and begin to get involved in their new community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":672,"featured_media":334322,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[9436,14,9046,21792],"class_list":["post-334302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community","tag-community","tag-events","tag-rochester-center-for-community-leadership","tag-wilson-day"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n