By Anne Hall

The gracious and talented Sarah Christensen, a Resident Advisor at CSUSM’s dorms, took it upon herself to motivate students on campus to spend a beautiful, sunny Sunday cleaning up the coastline around the Oceanside pier.

This motivated young student notified people that were living in her dorm and occupying campus to let people know that the event was taking place on March 9.  Students gathered at the Sprinter and hopped a ride to the end of the line to catch some rays and make a difference in their community.

“We really try to focus our events so that people can not only have fun with it, but also get information out of it and learn something in a new experience. We really want to make it impactful for them.  Everyone really enjoyed this event and people were thanking us all day as we were walking along the beach,” the event’s coordinator, Sarah Christensen, said.

RA’s work off of a model that uses five categories, which comes from an established curricular model that focuses on human development to motivate the residents while living in the dorms.  Among those five categories are civic engagement & social responsibility, holistic wellness, career development, leadership & interpersonal development and critical thinking & ethical reasoning.

“I thought of something to do as far as community and I thought that a beach clean up would be a really great thing to do because I love animals. So I thought we could go around and pick up all the trash and everything and get some sun for a little bit and it also taught us how to use public transportation, so there were various levels of learning that people could get out of the event,” Christensen said.

“It was really fun.  I think it was cool to give back to the community.  There was a lot of trash that needed to be picked up,” a Quad resident and second year business major, Maegen Luna, said.

“It was actually very fun because I was able to do it with friends.  I felt like I contributed and was able to help out my community.  It may not look like it’s dirty, but once it starts stacking up you can really see that it did need to be cleaned up,” a motivated participant and second year kinesiology major, Betsy Flores, said.

“When I was going through it and thinking about all of the things that we were picking up, I was thinking about how it could impact animals if they ate it.  I’m always watching documentaries about things on the soda cans and how much a difference picking up those little things can do for the few animals that we might help.  I thought that was pretty cool,” another Quad resident, Rio Ammari, said.

Some students attended the beach cleanup in groups.

“My roommates wrote it on the board in our dorm. We found out from our RA, Sarah. She came by and told us about it and had the sign up sheet so we really felt like we wanted to do it,” Rio’s roommate, Zhaina Moya, said.

Sarah Christensen offered the event to her residents first, and then went around the Quad to engage others and find equal interest in joining the group.

“We want to do it again and make the event an even bigger one,” Christensen said.

The next event is tentatively scheduled for 8 a.m. on April 26.  People interested in participating in the event can contact Sarah directly at [email protected].