Kennesaw State’s Day of Service event presented issues with organization and communication that took away from the local communities involved.
The KSU Day of Service is a volunteer service event held annually at Kennesaw State University (KSU) since 2014. As KSU’s “largest day of service,” it allows students, faculty and external volunteers to come together to serve local communities in need.
However, although 600 student and external volunteers participated in KSU’s 11th annual Day of Service, this year’s event had organizational issues that interfered with giving back.
For one, the mandatory kickoff took a large chunk of the event’s allotted time. Students were told to arrive by 8:45AM to be able to participate in the 9:00AM event, but by 9:15AM, students were still lined up to get signed in. It wasn’t for another 30 minutes that volunteers were officially being released to head to their respective locations, which put a damper on time allotted for volunteer work.
Additionally, although flyers and emails promised a variety of breakfast foods for the kickoff, supplies ran out very quickly, and some weren’t offered at all. Students should have been informed of the limited stock so they could prepare food for the day in their own time, especially those with dietary restrictions that were unaware there would only be one option instead of the multiple as advertised.
“I wish there were more check-in people (as the line was getting very long when I arrived) and more breakfast options (the taquitos were gone, there was only chicken biscuits left, and there was no promised coffee or orange juice where it stated in the flyers),” Student Liccy Arias Martinez said in her impact statement.
The 2025 KSU Day of Service was by registration only, so there was an exact count available for organizing the sign-in, catering and entire kickoff event. With better organization and communication, these issues could have been avoided.
After the kickoff, transportation to and from volunteer locations quickly became a problem. Poor organization led to buses being delayed or mislabeled, meaning many students did not arrive at the right place at the right time.
Fadil Langston, a student who attended the event, said, “Due to some confusion with transportation, I had traveled with the wrong group and had no transportation for the way back after the event was completed.”
For those volunteering at one of the six sites with Keep Cobb Beautiful, this problem was further exacerbated by stopping at the organization’s own kickoff event before heading to the official volunteering location. This meant that students spent over an hour both ways on the bus between multiple locations, wasting precious time that was already strained from the late KSU kickoff.
Students at Keep Cobb Beautiful sites ended up volunteering for less than an hour, and many buses returned later than intended, with some arriving as late as an hour and a half after the listed 1:00PM end time.
Triston Gibson, a student at Keep Cobb Beautiful site six, spoke about his experience at the Day of Service.
“The KSU Day of Service event was a great opportunity… However, we spent most of the time driving instead of doing community service because of some miscommunications between our site leader and the organizers,” he said.
“I would say we did a little under an hour of actual service and the rest was driving and stops which prohibited us from doing more service,” Gibson added.
With these issues in mind, it’s clear that the 2025 KSU Day of Service had severe structural issues that stemmed from poor organization and communication. A day that was supposed to be dedicated to giving back was spent making empty promises to the volunteers and local communities involved.
