Groups

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Alternative Spring Breaks @ Stanford
Service. Learning. Social Change.

Alternative Spring Breaks (ASB) @ Stanford are immersive service-learning programs that expose students to pressing social and cultural issues through community engagement, experiential education, direct service, group discussions, assigned readings, and reflective activities. The program’s vision is to empower students to become informed advocates for social change—locally, nationally, and globally.

ASB is a student-led Voluntary Student Organization (VSO) at Stanford University and an affiliate of the Haas Center for Public Service. As a proud Break Away Chapter Program, ASB would not be possible without the generous support of ASSU Special Fees.

Impact
Transforming students into lifelong advocates for social issues.

ASB programs have inspired students to remain engaged with the social and cultural issues they explore—leading to the creation of student groups, the pursuit of new academic paths, and even long-term career shifts rooted in public service and social advocacy.

History
The first ASB trip took place in 1987, organized by staff at what was then the Public Service Center (now the Haas Center for Public Service). As student interest grew, ASB evolved into a registered, student-run organization. In 1996, a winter-quarter course was added to enhance learning ahead of the spring break trips.

By the late 2000s, ASB expanded its reach:

In 2008, Impact Abroad launched, offering global service-learning trips during the summer.

In 2012, ThanksGiving Back was introduced as a new opportunity during Thanksgiving break.

At its peak, ASB offered up to 18 courses and trips per year, continuing to be a transformative experience for hundreds of Stanford students.

Recognition
ASB has earned national acclaim from Break Away, including awards for:

Alternative Spring Break Program of the Year

Curriculum-Based Alternative Break of the Year

At Stanford, ASB was honored with the Lyons Service Award in 1998 and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Dean of Students in 2002. The program celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2012, marking a legacy of impact and leadership in public service education. In 2025, ASB was recognized by Stanford Report for the incredible programs and opportunities it provides to the student community.

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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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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 coach 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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Direct clinical experience with patients and access to Stanford medical faculty members.

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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 young middle schoolers 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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Love-All is a student-run weekly athletic instruction program committed to inspiring a love for regular physical activity in individuals with intellectual developmental disabilities (IDDs). The club will offer a platform for Stanford students to share their love of athletic instruction to kids with IDD and offer professional training to develop the leadership, responsibility, and communication skills needed to teach children with IDDs.

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Our project directly addresses the critical issue of unequal access to education in specialized fields like marine sciences, which are essential for fostering awareness and solutions for ocean sustainability. Subjects like marine sciences require specialized knowledge, tools, and expertise, often out of reach for students in marginalized schools. This inequity limits their understanding of ocean-related challenges and fuels a vicious cycle of limited opportunity, ultimately hindering efforts to build an ocean-literate society. Our project will bridge this gap through hands-on educational outreach by aligning with SDG 4: Quality Education and the UN Decade of Ocean Science’s Challenge 10. We want to provide engaging and accessible learning experiences that connect school children, especially from marginalized communities, to the oceans. Our oceans sustain life and are under the constant threat of climate change. We will motivate a new generation of ocean-literate citizens to contribute meaningfully to ocean stewardship and sustainable development by supporting a new generation of ocean-literate citizens.

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MELODY (Music Enriching the Lives of Developing Youth) is a volunteer organization based at Stanford University. The group offers free private lessons and music theory tutoring to students. Started in 1998 as a part of the Stanford Alliance for Service Through the Arts, MELODY grew to include approximately twenty Stanford tutors per year, serving roughly twenty-five elementary school students, but took a large hit during the pandemic. Now the club is working year by year to grow again in collaboration with Eastside College Preparatory School, where volunteers go once a week to work with individual students, building a tutor-student relationship throughout the year.

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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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The purpose of SOAP Notes is to utilize music performance and production as a form of service, enriching the lives of individuals interfacing with the healthcare system, including but not limited to patients and their families, long-term care facility residents, and healthcare providers. After connecting with and learning about their music interests, SOAP Notes members will work together with each individual to produce music tailored to them and send it as a lasting gift that they and their families can treasure for life. 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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Sprout Up provides free, college-student led environmental education programs to 1st and 2nd grade classrooms.

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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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Stanford Cancer Caregiver Collective's mission is to provide support for family members of cancer patients through awareness and education of their experiences.

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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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Before Covid times, SHARED was group of undergraduate volunteers who worked with patients in the Emergency Department to identify high risk health behaviors, screen for social needs, provide health education and connect patients to community and hospital resources. Volunteers also worked with local organizations such as Second Harvest and learned about social determinants of health in EMED 125.

Given SHARED's, meaningful community impact and the experience students gained from their involvement, SHARED needs to be revived! This group is dedicated to making SHARED what it once was.

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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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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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(1) To engage more Stanford students in science outreach by providing flexible and high-quality outreach opportunities with middle school and high school students.
(2) To provide science role models for 6th-12th graders in disadvantaged schools, locally and across the U.S. and abroad, and expose them to diverse scientific careers.

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The purpose of this organization is to bring together students with a passion for art and give them a space to use their creativity to uplift women by utilizing artistic passion in parallel to philanthropic action. We will also collect donations of sanitary products for women's shelters and health centers, as well as promote education of menstrual health and advertise existing resources to combat period poverty.

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The mission of Stanford Synapse: Brain Injury Support Group is twofold:
1) to provide Stanford students with an opportunity to serve as leaders within the local community and learn about the patient perspective of living with a brain injury
2) to provide individuals with brain injuries with support, exposure to additional resources, and opportunities to connect with and learn from one another
Our organization accomplishes this by fostering the formation of supportive relationships between undergraduates and individuals with brain injury (BI).

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Our goal is to bring awareness and hands-on exposure towards end-of-life care to undergraduate students across campus. Students who volunteer with us will have the chance to meaningfully interact with patients and learn to compassionately care for adults and their families through our four initiatives.

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Stanford Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity, and Sustainability (SEEDS) is a student group committed to increasing diversity and providing accessible opportunities in the field of ecology. We are a chapter of the national SEEDS program of the Ecological Society of America (ESA).

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We are committed to educating the Stanford community about the silent/ hidden crisis of human trafficking both in the local Palo Alto community as well as the surrounding Bay Area. Through this organization, we hope to teach our peers the necessary skills to tap into their roles as students and advocates for our local communities. We aim to create opportunities for Stanford students interested in getting involved with social justice and community service through projects, lecture series, and workshops.

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We are a collective of STEM students and workers fighting for science and tech for liberation, not global oppression. The tech empire, with Stanford at its core, drives worker exploitation, surveillance, climate destruction, and genocidal violence. The system relies on our labor and complicity, and we have the power to halt this. Born from the Palestine solidarity movement, Tech for Liberation builds power in our departments, labs, and classrooms to end the tech war machine.

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Inspiring future bibliophiles, one book at a time

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Stanford Science Bus is an outreach program led by graduate students from across departments. We operate an after-school program to inspire enthusiasm about science and provide mentorship from scientists. Through our partnership with East Palo Alto Charter School (EPACS), we teach hands-on science to grades 2-6 to encourage and inspire passion for engaging in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

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The Stanford Bicycle Project is a registered community-service organization at Stanford University focused on promoting bicycle safety, sustainability and self-reliance. Founded in 2015, the Stanford Bicycle Project represents a strong team of student-mechanics who are passionate about cycling, engineering and helping their community. Originally endowed with a focus on both holding free bicycle repair classes and repairing abandoned bicycles for donation, the Stanford Bicycle Project has since expanded to include a partnership with the Parent's Club and FLIP to repair and distribute bicycles to students each Fall.

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"To aid in the care and enrichment of veterans' lives across the nation. Ultimately, we endeavor to bring USVH to every VA Hospital in the nation to foster relationships between collegiate volunteers and patients who have given so much to our country."

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WYSE's mission is to empower young women via the provision of resources and support necessary for young women to make positive life choices and to create change in their communities.

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