Groups

Mission

Mission
The Alternative Breaks@Stanford service and learning immersion programs expose students to complex social and cultural issues through community visits, experiential learning, direct service, group discussion, readings, and reflection activities. The program's vision is to transform students into advocates of social change on issues affecting our local, national and global communities. Alternative Breaks@Stanford is a Voluntary Student Organization Voluntary Student Organization at Stanford University and a student-led affiliate of the Haas Center for Public Service. Alternative Breaks would not exist without the generous funding from ASSU Special Fees. Alternative Breaks@Stanford is a Break Away Chapter Program.

Impact
Transforming students into advocates of social change.

Alternative Break programs have inspired many students to continue their involvement with the particular social/cultural issues they explored through their course and trip. Student groups have been formed, majors changed, and new careers discovered.

History
The first alternative break trip occurred during spring break in 1987. This first trip was led by staff members of what was then called the Public Service Center (later renamed the Haas Center for Public Service). The spring break program grew and eventually became a student-run registered organization at Stanford – Alternative Spring Break (ASB). In 1996 a winter quarter course was added to the program to complement the trip and to enhance the student learning experience. The ASB program has thrived on campus growing to offer as many as 18 courses and trips each year.

Based on the success and growing interest in ASB, in 2008 the Impact Abroad program was launched to provide similar opportunities on a global level during the summer quarter. In 2012, as part of ASB's 25th anniversary celebration, the ThanksGiving Back program was launched to offer opportunities during the Thanksgiving week break.

Recognition
Stanford's ASB Program has been nationally recognized with awards from BreakAway, the national alternative break organization. The program has been honored as the "Alternative Spring Break Program of the Year" as well as the "Curriculum Based Alternative Break of the Year."

At Stanford, ASB was acknowledged for its efforts to introduce students to community service with a Lyons Service Award in 1998. In 2002, ASB was again recognized for its contributions by an Outstanding Achievement Award by the Dean of Students. In 2012, ASB celebrated its 25th anniversary.

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The Mission of Arbor Free Clinic is to provide culturally appropriate, high quality transitional medical care for an underserved patient population and to educate and empower a new generation of health care leaders to proactively address health disparities and improve access to care in their communities.

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The Barrio Assistance Tutoring Program exists to provide consistent and quality academic tutoring and mentoring for K-12 school children in the community, primarily from East Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The program focuses on providing individualized tutoring to each child, given their academic and language needs. We aim to provide our students with a holistic approach to programming—one that engages them academically while also enriching them as full and complex persons. In this way, it is our mission to assist our students in developing positive self-images, self-learning, and self pride, in addition to viewing themselves as life-long learners. Through these aims, we hope to empower our students to realize their full potential, and thus open themselves to further opportunities.

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Our mission is to engage teens through their own creativity and culture in bioengineering/biomaterial design and create pathways for them to share their learning in their home communities.

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The mission of Cardinal Free Clinics is to provide culturally appropriate, high quality transitional medical care for an underserved patient population and to educate and empower a new generation of health care leaders to proactively address health disparities and improve access to care in their communities.

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The Cardinal Policy Group provides students with an opportunity to develop skills relevant to policy analysis and work with policymakers and organizations to use policy as a lever for social change.

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We are Cards 4 Kids, an organization dedicated to fostering genuine connections, creating moments of joy, and building a supportive community for children through interactive, fun, and accessible sports-inspired activities.

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Challah brings people together to bake and sell challah to raise money and awareness for social justice. As a chapter, we have pledged to partner with other student groups at Stanford in order to support a wide range of humanitarian organizations, such as the War Effort in Ukraine, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Jewish Child and Family Services, and Make A Wish, to name a few. We have a diverse reach on campus and in the surrounding community, and the Challah at Stanford chapter and all of its partners are committed to supporting humanitarian organizations of all shapes and forms, local and international.

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Using our skills and positionality as Stanford students in technical fields to create a more just Stanford and world

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Consult Your Community (CYC) is a national nonprofit consulting organization uplifting local communities by empowering local businesses. We prepare and mobilize Stanford students on skills-based consulting projects to leverage their education, digital fluency, mentorship networks, and knowledge as customers to transform how a local business is portrayed, functions, and engages with the community surrounding it.

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The purpose of the Educational Studies Program is to provide extracurricular enrichment programs for secondary school students.

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Our mission is to cultivate and celebrate the imaginations and language arts of young people through creative writing workshops in local elementary schools, in-school performances of the young authors' stories, and a quarterly on-campus public performance of this work.

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This organization is founded on the collective interest between graduate students, high school
students, and high school faculty to engage and empower the next generation of scientists,
especially students who belong to groups that are underrepresented in STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) professions.

Graduate student mentors will lead and work alongside teams of high school students to answer
open questions in science or conduct novel engineering studies inspired by students' curiosities.
The goals of these activities are exposing students to STEM fields, problems, and methodologies,
fostering and encouraging their curiosities, developing their creative and critical thinking skills, and
challenging misconceptions about research and researchers among high school students and
graduate students.

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Habla is a community-engaged learning organization in which students teach English as a Second Language (ESL) to native Spanish-speaking workers on campus. We match Stanford students with custodians, landscapers, dining hall workers, and other staff members for one-on-one language coaching. Habla focuses on real-world language skills, from handling parent-teacher conferences to studying for citizenship tests.

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Stanford Healing Harmonies is centered around the intersection of music, medicine, and service. We strive to promote healing through music by performing instrumental music off-campus at various community centers, providing opportunities for connection and engagement through music.

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Healing Strokes hopes to facilitate relaxation-based art therapy for stroke patients and their carers with the goal of helping alleviate post-stroke depression often experienced during recovery. Post-stroke depression and related anxiety affects about a third of all stroke survivors, yet many hospitals often lack the proper mental wellness resources needed to address this issue. Under the guidance of neurologist Dr. Nirali Vora and occupational therapist Julie Muccini, we have crafted a relaxation-based art therapy curriculum using an integrated patient-carer team approach. By facilitating creative-art based therapy workshops, we hope undergraduates would be able to gain experience cultivating empathy-based communities, helping to alleviate depressive symptoms among stroke survivors and increasing relief amongst caregivers. We hope to create an undergraduate community that is challenged to engage in discussions of ethical practices both with therapy and with patients as a whole.

By establishing a welcoming space for creative outlet, Healing Strokes hopes to alleviate depressive symptoms among stroke survivors and provide relief for caregivers.

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Our mission is to provide innovative and effective comprehensive health education to teens to prepare them for life's challenges. Our curriculum equips teens with knowledge, skills, and tools to make sound choices and informed decisions for themselves.

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Kids With Dreams is a Stanford group that works with children and young adults in the Palo Alto area with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We organize a variety of events like SNAP (Special Needs Aquatics Program), YDFA (Youth Drama For All), Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, and more. We also organize events within the quarter for the buddy program, like Silent Discos and Winter Formal. The aim of the program is to provide friendship and support for a variety of people in the community.

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Rem at Stanford is on a mission to keep doors open and dreams alive for small businesses in the Bay Area. Through pro-bono consulting projects, Rem at Stanford creates an immersive curriculum shaping students and young problem-solvers into the next generation of impact-driven innovators. Rem at Stanford is a way for students to develop new personal and professional relationships, engage in unique hands-on learning experiences, and–most of all–positively impact their community.

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SOAPNotes is a group of composers, arrangers, performers and audio producers who utilize music performance and production as a form of service for patients in the hospital. After first interacting with and learning about the music interests of a patient, members will arrange, perform, record and produce music to send to the patient as a gift as a form of emotional support. As a group, SOAP Notes seeks to foster an open environment in which individuals with complementary music skill sets can connect with, work with and learn from each other, while making the process of developing a music project into a full production more accessible.

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Side by Side is a community service singing group that performs songs from the '20s to the '60s at senior communities in the area. Our vision is to bring joy and good memories back to the elderly, a population that is often overlooked, through music and personal interaction. Music is a powerful tool in breaking barriers that conventional methods sometimes cannot overcome, and it allows us to interact with residents for whom talking is difficult or impossible.

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Thousands of individuals are diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease and neurodegenerative dementia. Our goal is to build meaningful, lasting relationships between college students and nursing home residents who are living with dementia during weekly one-on-one visits. We strive to break through the profound isolation and social disengagement imposed by Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia and promote awareness of these neurodegenerative conditions. The main projects of SAA include weekly visits with Companions, weekly journaling after visits, and reflection meetings.

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The Stanford Breakfast Club's mission is to help alleviate the homelessness crisis in the Bay Area by providing Stanford students with accessible and direct volunteering at the Opportunity Center in Palo Alto. Our hope is that these opportunities will promote connection between Stanford students and the residents at the Opportunity Center in Palo Alto.

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The goal of the Stanford Community Gardens is to provide students with spaces to garden and socialize with other student gardeners.

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Stanford Engineering Research Introductions Organization (SERIO) is an organization where
graduate students can come together to empower students early in their undergraduate career, particularly freshmen and sophomores from underrepresented communities, to pursue graduate academic engineering research.

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Stanford STEM Nights aims to encourage K-12 students to develop their interests in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by hosting science nights at underserved elementary and middle schools where students will be able to engage with Stanford students leading various science experiments and activities. The organization will also mentor middle and high school students working on science fair projects and organize an annual Invention Convention or Maker Convention where aspiring engineers and innovators can showcase their work and learn from their peers.

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The Stanford Housing Equity Project exists to connect resources of Silicon Valley and higher academia to community initiatives supporting low-income and unsheltered residents to housing and social support through establishing high-quality programming and long-term organizational capacity.

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Our mission is two-fold: (1) nurture strong, healthy family foundations in an effort to prevent domestic violence from occurring and (2) foster a new generation of informed, proactive leaders to help prevent domestic violence.

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To create a community of students who are passionate about learning and spreading knowledge about kidney disease, which continues to be under-researched and underserved within the community.

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Our mission is to engage the many Stanford students whose interest in STEM came from Science Olympiad (SciOly) and other related science extracurricular activities by facilitating meaningful science outreach and contributions to the pre-collegiate SciOly program. Our organization will partner with local middle and high schools in underprivileged communities to help create and coach SciOly teams. We will also host an annual SciOly tournament on Stanford campus where local students and students we are coaching can compete in different science events. Club members will also have the opportunity to volunteer at other local competitions and official SciOly competitions on the regional, state, and national level. We aim to generally provide opportunities for the SciOly alumni community at Stanford to pass on their love for science and inspire a new generation of high school students to find careers in STEM.

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