Spring Break: Service Gone Wild

Can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Illustration: Gordon Studer

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For spring break fun, can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Rite of Spring: Tequila shots
Righteous Spring: Measles shots. Public health students from the University of Michigan spend their vacation observing a childhood vaccination program in China.

Rite of Spring: Señor Frog’s
Righteous Spring: See more frogs. Life Changing Travel’s Galapagos Islands trip has students building trails, adding native plants, and working at the islands’ research stations.

Rite of Spring: Gaudy cruise
Righteous Spring: Godly crusade. Students spend four days lobbying with the Oregon Right to Life Education Foundation. Highlight: the quiz game “Who Wants to Be a Pro-Lifer?”

Rite of Spring: Contracting stds
Righteous Spring: Preventing them via an AmeriCorps condom distribu­tion and sex ed trip to Charlotte, North Carolina

Rite of Spring: Drama
Righteous Spring: Dharma. A retreat at Virginia’s Radford University includes an ass-numbing 15 hours of silent meditation.

Rite of Spring: Crossing the border
Righteous Spring: Walking the border. University of California-Berkeley students tour the routes used by illegal immigrants coming into the US. ­But instead of following los coyotes, the students are guided by la migra.

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Owned by no one—except you.

We just keep seeing it happen: Newsrooms owned by billionaires and corporations are spinning their own narratives, overwriting the truth, following only stories that keep them in the pocket of those with even more power.

Not here. We’re not owned by anyone. We’re not part of any cult that demands our allegiance to a bottom line. We’ve spoken up and spoken out while other newsrooms changed their stories—or cut them altogether—to keep the C suite happy.

Our mission is to find the truth and amplify it. That’s why we’re independent, nonprofit, and, crucially, funded by readers. The investigations on our website will always be free to read, watch, and listen to, but our newsroom is powered by readers who pitch in what they can so we can keep asking the hard questions.

Can you chip in today?

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